Hi All:

   At last, after some 8 months, I'm nearly finished with my
lightmap-baking demo/tutorial. The technique I developed works great
within the limitations of lightmapping, but I've a problem deciding
which scripting language to use for a little external tool that is
necessary to write some files.

   I tried at first to use only POV-Ray for that, but there was a little
obstacle which forced me to use some external programming: I need to
read the geometry file exported by Poseray, to find the objects and
materials names... so I cannot use POV-Ray file I/O.

   As I'm used to write and read text files with PHP, I just wrote a
little script for use with PHP_CLI from the command line. It works
great for me, but perhaps it isn't a great choice for multiplatform
distribution... The problem is I cannot find anything better, as I will
prefer to distribute just a configurable text file.

   Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only with
POV-Ray?)

-- 
Jaime Vives Piqueres
		
La Persistencia de la Ignorancia
http://www.ignorancia.org

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On 4/13/2011 15:38, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only with
> POV-Ray?)

Something you can write in a portable scripting language that you can wrap 
up as a stand-alone executable for various common platforms is probably 
best. I use Tcl for that, personally.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> On 4/13/2011 15:38, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> > Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only with
> > POV-Ray?)
>
> Something you can write in a portable scripting language that you can wrap
> up as a stand-alone executable for various common platforms is probably
> best. I use Tcl for that, personally.

it's a good choice, yes.  And even Tcl is a more sane language than PHP, aside
from the spaghetti-code like nature of being able to eval local variables in
"upper" environments... lol

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On 4/13/2011 19:42, nemesis wrote:
> eval local variables in
> "upper" environments... lol

If you do that for writing anything except your own flow control statements, 
you deserve what you get.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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El 14/04/11 04:21, Darren New escribió:
> On 4/13/2011 15:38, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
>> Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only
>> with POV-Ray?)
>
> Something you can write in a portable scripting language that you can
>  wrap up as a stand-alone executable for various common platforms is
>  probably best. I use Tcl for that, personally.

   Perhaps I didn't emphasize it enough, but I really hoped not to have
to distribute an executable... the script is very simplistic right now:
it just defines some configuration variables at the top, and uses them
to read a POV-Ray include file, extract objects and material names, and
write some resulting files.

   So, at the moment, the "user" needs to edit the script before using it
on his own scenes. The ideal situation would be to write this tool with
POV-Ray SDL, so I could be sure any POV-Ray user will have the means to
use it, but I think this is not possible.

   Being that lazy, I didn't want to implement proper command-line
arguments or input dialogs, as the whole thing it's just a "proof of
concept" demo. But I would like others to test it, so I guess I will
have to...


-- 
Jaime Vives Piqueres
		
La Persistencia de la Ignorancia
http://www.ignorancia.org

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Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:

> > On 4/13/2011 15:38, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> >> Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only
> >> with POV-Ray?)
> >
> > Something you can write in a portable scripting language that you can
> >  wrap up as a stand-alone executable for various common platforms is
> >  probably best. I use Tcl for that, personally.

>    Perhaps I didn't emphasize it enough, but I really hoped not to have
> to distribute an executable... the script is very simplistic right now:
> it just defines some configuration variables at the top, and uses them
> to read a POV-Ray include file, extract objects and material names, and
> write some resulting files.

  Perhaps you could write several versions of the script for the scripting
languages that are most "native" to each of the three major operating
systems. IIRC there's some scripting language that Windows supports
out-of-the-box, and on the linux side you have plenty to choose from
(one to consider, if possible, is using shell scripting, if its features
are enough, as that's the most ubiquitous in unix/linux). On the Mac you
could look at AppleScript, which is supported natively (or if the shell
scripting works, it should work there as well, although Mac users are not
very accustomed to using the command line).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignoranciaorg> wrote:

> > > On 4/13/2011 15:38, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> > >> Any recommendations? (or perhaps I overlooked a way to do it only
> > >> with POV-Ray?)
> > >
> > > Something you can write in a portable scripting language that you can
> > >  wrap up as a stand-alone executable for various common platforms is
> > >  probably best. I use Tcl for that, personally.
>
> >    Perhaps I didn't emphasize it enough, but I really hoped not to have
> > to distribute an executable... the script is very simplistic right now:
> > it just defines some configuration variables at the top, and uses them
> > to read a POV-Ray include file, extract objects and material names, and
> > write some resulting files.
>
>   Perhaps you could write several versions of the script for the scripting
> languages that are most "native" to each of the three major operating
> systems. IIRC there's some scripting language that Windows supports
> out-of-the-box, and on the linux side you have plenty to choose from
> (one to consider, if possible, is using shell scripting, if its features
> are enough, as that's the most ubiquitous in unix/linux). On the Mac you
> could look at AppleScript, which is supported natively (or if the shell
> scripting works, it should work there as well, although Mac users are not
> very accustomed to using the command line).
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp

I fail to see the advantage of going bonkers providing multiple versions of the
same script to support multiple "native" scrpting environments when there are
multiple far better offerings than the native stuff that are both a fast and
free download and also multiplatform.

Jaime, being able to wrap your script in an executable together with the
interpreter is a bonus.  Tcl is just like any other scripting language and you
can just distribute the script and a link to where to obtain the interpreter.

I prefer python as a language, but Tcl is a good choice too.

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nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I fail to see the advantage of going bonkers providing multiple versions of the
> same script to support multiple "native" scrpting environments when there are
> multiple far better offerings than the native stuff that are both a fast and
> free download and also multiplatform.

  You fail to see the advantage? How about you take the script and just
run it, without having to figure out what else you need to download and
install before you can run it. The less steps one needs to run the script,
the better.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Am 14.04.2011 00:38, schrieb Jaime Vives Piqueres:

> At last, after some 8 months, I'm nearly finished with my
> lightmap-baking demo/tutorial. The technique I developed works great
> within the limitations of lightmapping, but I've a problem deciding
> which scripting language to use for a little external tool that is
> necessary to write some files.

Any popular general-purpose scripting language will probably do: I guess 
Perl, Python and Ruby all come with interpreters for most any platform 
you might name.

I know none of these, so like Darren I'd personally go for Tcl; as 
already mentioned, you don't need to use Tk (the most popular GUI 
toolkit for Tcl), but I find it a nice-to-have. I know of free 
interpreters for both Linux and Windows, and I guess there's something 
for the Mac available as well.

One thing that should be noted is that not all people accept all 
scripting languages equally well, and some may refuse to install 
interpreters for whatever language you choose. I, for instance, would 
hesitate to install a PHP interpreter on my machine, but would be ok 
with Perl, Python or Ruby (and, as you probably guess, have Tcl 
installed already); I must confess this is an only marginally 
rationalized preference, but I may not be alone with such a preference.

Interestingly enough, I don't recall ever hearing anyone take a 
categoric stance against Tcl, so it might raise the fewest resentments.

That said, when it comes to writing platform-independent scripts with 
the intention to distribute them, I think the most commonly used 
language for such a purpose might be Perl.

In case you should decide to split up the script into a kind of config 
file and the actual code, Java would probably be the way to go.

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On 4/14/2011 6:56, Warp wrote:
> nemesis<nam### [at] gmailcom>  wrote:
>> I fail to see the advantage of going bonkers providing multiple versions of the
>> same script to support multiple "native" scrpting environments when there are
>> multiple far better offerings than the native stuff that are both a fast and
>> free download and also multiplatform.
>
>    You fail to see the advantage? How about you take the script and just
> run it, without having to figure out what else you need to download and
> install before you can run it. The less steps one needs to run the script,
> the better.

Well, as nemesis says, my intention was to suggest a simple cross-platform 
scripting language (like Tcl or Python) for the script, *plus* do the 
up-front work of wrapping it in a native no-install executable for each of 
the major platforms if you care to promote usage. Distribute both the short 
script and the "use this if you don't want to install the scripting 
environment" version.

My MakeDF3 code[*] is like that.  It's a Tcl script that I run through 
freewrap, so you have MakeDF3.tcl if you want to edit it or you already have 
Tcl installed, or MakeDF3.exe if you're on Windows and you just want to use 
the tool and don't mind that it takes up another meg of disk space.

If you're just writing files and not using a whole bunch of utility 
libraries, writing it in C and asking someone to compile it for each 
platform for you can also work well. Once you start linking in things like 
Windows or Linux packages, that becomes less feasible.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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