Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?

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Chris <chr### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
: Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?

  Well, if MegaPov can do everything povray can, plus more, what do you think?

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):_;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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Warp wrote:
> 
> Chris <chr### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> : Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?
> 
>   Well, if MegaPov can do everything povray can, plus more, what do   >   you think?

That MegaPOV is more unstable.

Remco Poelstra

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In article <399a42e7@news.povray.org>, "Chris" <chr### [at] yahoocom> 
wrote:

> Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?

Better for what? It includes many new features and bug fixes, but scenes 
using these features are not compatible with the official version and 
may not be completely compatible with future versions. It is no better 
or worse for learning to use POV, since the language hasn't been 
fundamentally changed. The Mac version of MegaPOV has a nifty new GUI 
with spline editors and enhanced templates, but some prefer the official 
GUI. Although it contains many fixes for bugs in the official version, 
there are also new bugs that have been added in the process of 
integrating patches or which came with the patches themselves, so it 
isn't really an improvement in stability. It doesn't render any faster 
most of the time, but includes features to make media and radiosity 
compute much faster.
It really depends on what you are going to be doing with it.

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] maccom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Personal Web page: http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG Web page: http://tag.povray.org/

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"Chris" wrote:
> Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?

That depends on in which way you mean better.

Is MegaPOV 0.5 better to use than POV-Ray 3.1?

MegaPOV has more features, but is also a more unstable and slow.
Anyway, I'd say MegaPOV is better to use.

But MegaPOV is not better in all respects. If it were, then MegaPOV should
be changed to be the official version, and I doubt that many people really
would want that.

Official POV-Ray is faster, more consistent and logic in syntax, have fewer
bugs, does only have features of a certain standard of usefulness, is much
better documented, and there's probably other advantages I have forgot.

I think that when POV-Ray 3.5 comes out I will stop using MegaPOV, even if
there's many MegaPOV features that doesn't make it into POV-Ray 3.5.

Greetings,

Rune
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Just out of curiosity; what is slower in Megapov. I really haven't really
done any comparisons, except you can't help but notice that radiosity is
faster (in MP).
I would have assumed that it would render pure POV 3.1 files very close to
exactly the same speed. (assuming that they were built with the same
compiler and options.)

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"Rune" <run### [at] inamecom> wrote...
> "Chris" wrote:
> > Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?
>
> Official POV-Ray is faster

That used to be true, but it is not anymore.  In fact, MegaPov is faster
than POV-Ray 3.1g in most cases.  MegaPov includes a number of speed
optimizations (such as the really great memory-allocation cache and the fast
macro patch) that more than make up for some of the things that slow it down
(such as uv mapping).

-Nathan

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"Chris" <chr### [at] yahoocom> wrote...
> Is MegaPOV better then plain ole Povray?

MegaPov should be thought of as the bleeding-edge development version of
POV-Ray.  Much of what you see in MegaPov is being transferred to the
official version of POV (3.5), usually with some nice refinements that
improve the syntax and implementation.

-Nathan

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Remco Poelstra <rjp### [at] homenl> wrote:
: That MegaPOV is more unstable.

  More unstable? I haven't noticed this.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):_;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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In article <399beb40@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>Remco Poelstra <rjp### [at] homenl> wrote:
>: That MegaPOV is more unstable.
>
>  More unstable? I haven't noticed this.

I don't think it's so much that it is more unstable, but that it has 
more features, some of which are unstable. For example, it is very easy 
to crash MegaPOV on my Macintosh when using post-processing on large 
images. Very difficult to crash Official POV when using post-processing 
on large images :*)

Jerry

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