On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 18:38:05 +0100, "Thorsten Froehlich"
<tho### [at] trfde> wrote:

>In article <3c0fa705.22070694@news.povray.org> , ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 
>'kENpEX' Pesce) wrote:
>
>> Mabye the problem is that developing an os
>> kernel really is harder than developing a raytracer...
>
>Well, maybe developing a *monolithic* kernel is harder than developing a
>raytracer.  Of course, this thread is about POV-Ray and not about the worst
>kernel design winning - which is precisely what Linux is and what is
>bloating the kernel and causing all the problems.  Or, maybe that is a
>general pattern of success:  Something hacked or bought together with no
>commitment to a good design (DOS, Windows, Linux, the original PC, the x86
>instruction sets).
>
>Anyway, all this is off-topic...

:)

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In article <3c0fc8ac.30686382@news.povray.org> , ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 
'kENpEX' Pesce) wrote:

> How should I know which compiler is used if I just have the binary
> file?

Apart from the little (and not too obvious) "icl" in the version string
POV-Ray prints every time you straet it, you could have seen it in the
release notes or being mentioned in many, many articles in p.beta-test.
Nearly everybody there knows that there is a Intel and a Visual C compile
... even I know and I am developing the Mac version .....

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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On Wed, 05 Dec 2001 20:01:56 GMT, ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 'kENpEX'
Pesce) wrote:

>nowdays everything is modelled with nurbs, subdivision surfaces and polygons

Really?

Real modelling tools (not artistic, mind you, modelling) don't even
have a NURBS primitive? To name a few - Mechanical Desktop,
SolidWorks, CATIA, Pro/Engineer, Mathra... NURBS are the lowest common
denominator tool accessible to everyone and anyone.

Tell me, how many ways do you know of drawing a curve? I can mention
about ten and of those I've used only five. In Mathra there are over
two hundred (200)! Most of what is used now has been developed there
and consequently leaked out, most notably Bezier splines (or at least
a few types of them).

So from the point of view of what *could* be implemented, NURBS are
almost as primitive as point-clouds :)


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 11:29:52 GMT, ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 'kENpEX'
Pesce) wrote:

>Flame war... it seems too much for a simple, polite, discussion about
>some topics of povray development... 

We're generally gentle and polite :)

>Well if someone here thinks that
>this is a flame war I'll go away, that wasn't my objective, and if I
>have to flame to say my opinion about povray features, and to say that
>imho there is something that is still lacking, well I really don't
>want to...

That's the spirit!

Take it easy... it's just that all these suggestions have been
discussed over and over again and the Team have had to justify their
modus operandi a thousand times and so on. Hey, we even had a "Beat
LightWave" frenzy at some point! And of course, POV won :)

Now seriously, everything you suggested, save displacement mapping and
assembler coding (ok, I may have missed something), is possible. There
is one problem: it either should be made perfect or not made at all.
That's the POV spirit. Of course this means a lot, an awful lot of
really hard work and research, and the related heaps of free time and
resources... which is something Team members are known to lack
(plainly because they spend whatever time they have left from making a
living on working on POV).

Now, it is a completely different matter if you come up with a working
idea. Working in the see-what-my-patch-can-do-and-it-seems-stable-for-
all-that-a-year-of-beta-testing-among-fifty-beta-testers-means sense.
And even then you will have no guarantee. But at least it will give
you a much better start.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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Just some off-topic statistics:

This is the second longest thread at least in the past three years outside
of p.off-topic.  The longest is still "The Language of POV-Ray" in g.general
with nearly 300 messages.  The message will probably be message 199 in this
thread.  It should be noted that that particular thread was also about
suggestions of how POV-Ray should develop in the future.  As was "4.0
Feature discussion", also in p.general, which was about half the length of
this thread...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:45:27 -0500, Alessandro Coppo <a.c### [at] iolit>
> wrote:
>>The ONLY reason why I haven't just downloaded BMRT and stopped thinking 
>>about POV is that BMRT is even less open source than POVRay!!!
>>
> 
> Just use PovMan... BMRT is too slow...
Huh? So far I had intention to only read this biig thread due to lack of time, 

but this statement makes me really to ask:is BMRT really slower than 

POVMan in similar scenes?? I really doubt it, especially if one takes 
into account that latest versions of BMRT allow to use precompiled 
shaders, which give performance boost 40-250% (according to 
c.g.r.renderman NG???) and are written by L. Gritz, who has learned CG 
in university, worked in Pixar and should know much more about CG than 
me (who has hacked this latest version of POVMan without any education 
in CG or similar areas)? According to my small performance tests most of 
time goes into texture calculation, so if one uses shaders, which are 
calculated by current implementation of shader's VM, then performance 
hit, which is not small, should be taken into account...
One big problem with shaders in POV-Ray (if we are talking about 
RenderMan shaders ) is that quite number of them is intended for 
parametric surfaces (in RenderMan most (or all?) primitive surfaces 
could be described as u-v parametric surfaces) and using such shaders in 
POV-Ray limits their use into small number of primitives, which have u-v 
parametrization implemented. And as I understand, separate step of 
compiling shader for POV-Ray seems to be too hard (or complex) for 
users, it would be better, if shader is described in POV-Ray SL (scene 
lenguaje) or compiled transparently.

>>P.S.: why the POVTeam asked in fact for feedbacks in the past about POV4 
>>feature list when all of you already have granitic ideas about what is 
>>"good" and what is not? I do not ask questions when I have already made up 
>>my mind.
>>
> Yes, is seems that noone has doubs about povray, its future and what
> should be done


Sorry to be OT here, but it really seems to me, that 'older 

habitants' started immediately 'to circle wagons', as you hit this NG 

with all these proposals. On one hand I quite understand them (as my 

butter to bread

comes from software projects, where responsible people (myself 
included!) are quite wary about changes in existing software development 
process or source code due to business risks) and such topics were 
discussed many times ('beaten to death') in this server NG-s, but on the 
other hand I'd like to see more openness from people, as some responses 
are quite defensive, seems like people take proposals in this thread as 
personal attacks or flamewar attempts.

One note about POV-Ray: in many cases you said, that you like to see,

that POV-Ray had more 'features', which are in commercial renderers. Yes, 

it would be good to have faster (in terms of rendering and scene creation) 

and more powerful application, but there is number of renderers competing in this

area and doing it better and faster for professionals; I see POV-Ray 
mainly as cheap (in terms of price, not possibilities!) tool for 
hobbists and beginners in CG area, from POV-Ray they can move to more 
proffessional and effective tools (like H.E. Day did).

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"Ron Parker" <ron### [at] povrayorg> wrote in message
news:slr### [at] fwicom...
> The text on the about box.  It was hard to find for me too, initially.

It's been equally (or more so) hard for me. I tried Ctrl+every letter key
and Alt+every letter key and nothing happened.

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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
: At least in

: File Formats
: - Saving the image to disk.

  The exact expression I use is "a source file describing the scene to
raytrace".

  Is that so bad?
  Perhaps I could just remove the word 'source'.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
: Gcc is not a serious environment for complex projects.

  Really? I make my living by coding C++. We use gcc.
  Ok, our project is not huge (about 50000 lines of code), but big enough for
not being just a small hobby program.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> Just some off-topic statistics:
> 
> This is the second longest thread at least in the past three years outside
> of p.off-topic.  The longest is still "The Language of POV-Ray" in g.general
> with nearly 300 messages.  The message will probably be message 199 in this
> thread.  It should be noted that that particular thread was also about
> suggestions of how POV-Ray should develop in the future.  As was "4.0
> Feature discussion", also in p.general, which was about half the length of
> this thread...
> 

What seems interesting to me is that the postings in this thread are only
by fairly few people, of course this is partly due to the fact that not
everyone is reading p.p. but the style of discussion here was also not
very pleasant and quite unproductive.  I think these things should be
taken more care of in future discussions on related topics.

Just my very humble opinion of course... ;-)

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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