On Tue, 04 Dec 2001 13:02:58 GMT, Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce demonstrated
that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing thusly:

>>  Dynamically loadable plugins and portability are mutually exclusive.
>>Not likely to happen. (Include files are a different thing, if that's what
>>you were talking about.)
> 
> I know... but this is a major feature so I think it could be worth the
> work. I know that this means to make some different implementations,

But it means for *everybody* to make different implementations, or for
every user to have their own compiler and know how to use it.  Sure,
GCC is free, but the "default" compilers for Mac and Windows cost actual 
money.  Besides that, most POV users (and by that I mean the ones who
haven't even found this server yet, let alone this group) are probably 
not going to want to mess with source code.

So, if we can't provide a plugin that will just work on every platform
that POV supports (ideally, including the ones that are supported by
third-party ports) it's really not going to work.

That's not to say that it'll never happen; anything's possible.  But 
if it does happen, it won't be a DLL or an .so file, and nobody will
have to use a C compiler to build it.

>>: 2) AFAIK (mabye i'm saying just bullshits here) povray does not use
>>: BSP trees for triangle meshes.
>>
>>  It uses octrees. It is very fast.
>>  Have you ever tried rendering a mesh with millions of triangles?
> Mhm... Dunno, this is a thing that needs experimenting but I always
> thought that bsp trees where faster

They might be marginally faster.  They're slower to build, though, so
there's a bit of a tradeoff.

> You can keep the portable C core and make an asm version too... This
> is what happens with many "portable" project. Speed is a major issue

Have you looked at the routines you're proposing that we rewrite in
assembly?  They're slow because they're complex floating-point math,
not because they're not assembly.  Rewriting them would accomplish just
one thing: it would make them harder for us to read.  They won't run
appreciably faster by being rewritten in any other language.  Your best
bet if you want faster is either to buy more computers or redesign the
algorithm, and buying more computers is more likely to help.

>>: 6) better radiosity :P
>>  Better in which way?
> Well, the experimental radiosity in povray 3.1 can't be called
> radiosity really... It's something different, a fake imho. I think it
> should use montecarlo radiosity in the future.

Well, you shall have your wish.  Ka-pwing!  It uses Monte Carlo radiosity.
Don't let it bother you that it has always used Monte Carlo radiosity; pay
no attention to that man behind the curtain.

>>: 7) displacement mapping
>>  Please provide the algorithms for this.
> If noone has clues on how to do this (I don't have them yet) I can
> search... I have a few good doc. sources and I know ppl that did this
> stuff too

Why don't you do that.  I mean, we never thought to actually look at any
sort of academic papers or scholarly journals or anything like that.  I've
never seen a SIGGRAPH proceedings in my life.  Gosh, why didn't this occur
to us sooner?  I'm sure there must be some miracle process out there by
which to displace arbitrary algebraic surfaces, if only we'd look.

But look here, we don't want any of those papers that require decomposition
into triangles, y'hear?  We already know about those, but POV doesn't use
triangles for everything like some inferior renderers do.

> Just another thing... Why don't include in the standard pack a few
> selected 3rd party tools/include files? It's not a bad idea, newtek
> does something like this for lightwave plugins (they include a bunch
> of freeware/lite versions of 3rdparty plugins in the main distro, they
> are REALLY useful)...

Why make the POV download take longer when you can just go download those
utilities yourself if you want them by following the links from our
linkmaster's superb link collection?  Unlike Newtek, we're not gouging 
the last dime from your wallet for our software, so we don't need to
toss in questionably-useful freeware to get you to think it was worth the
price.

--
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_)*(_1-_)#end#macro Z(_1 _ __)union{P(_)P(-_)R(y-z-1_)translate.1*_1-y*8pigment{
rgb<S(7)S(5)S(3)>}}#if(_1)Z(_1-__,_,__)#end#end Z(10x*-2,.2)camera{rotate x*90}

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