William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
>
> C seems to stand for color. (There are other unused classifications)
> The number after the D is depth [recursion_limit]...
>
> The next three float values are the location.
> ...
> Field 11, like the normal field, is a string representing 3 x,y,z values
> pointing, roughly in the direction where the nearest distance sample was
> taken.

Do you happend to know how those string representations can be 'decoded'? They
are written as
  7ffe7   ,  11ba94 , etc.

Is it hexadecimal, perhaps? (Sorry, I'm no longer familiar with hex, from my
university days long ago; I'm way out of practice with it.)

>
> I'm not aware of a way to force a stop immediately after...
> radiosity sample file creation. Is there one?

I have not yet found a way either; it seems that *some* new radiosity samples
are always created when using a saved radiosity file, regardless of
always_sample on/off or pretrace_start/pretrace_end being changed to 1.0.
(Changing any of radiosity's other settings has unintended and unexpected
results, from my tests *so far*.)

About 'hacking' the saved radiosity file:
It's an interesting idea, but will probably not work as intended. Here's an
example of why:
1) I rendered a typical still-image radiosity scene, while saving the rad data
to a file.
2) I re-rendered the scene using the saved data, with always_sample off and
pretrace_start/end changed to 1.0. At this point, I cannot tell how many 'new'
radiosity light patches have been created (without doing a 'difference'
comparison in Photoshop); probably more than what is in the saved file.
3) I then opened the file in POV-ray and *erased* 90+ percent of the data lines
there(!), then re-saved the file.
4) I re-rendered the scene again with the 'new' file-- and there are just as
many radiosity light patches as before, except that most are now
randomly-placed.

I had *assumed* that this new file would greatly reduce the number of light
patches, but that's not the case.

Apparently,POV-ray is always trying to add new light patches when there are 'not
enough' (?), or something like that. So, editing/hacking the file may not
produce the intended results.

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