Povray 3.1

A review of the Amiga version, October 1998

Well, just the other day I went to the povray amiga site and downloaded the new version of povray, version 3.1. This version had come out back in September but I kept putting it off. The web page recommends installing it in a new directory, keeping the old 3.0 directory around for a while during the transition. So I finally got around to freeing up the space on my HD. We all know what a project that can be.

On saturday I unpacked the archive to the directory to install from. I double clicked on the installer script. Error.

Well, it seems that whoever prepared the installer script for povray 3.1 had set the icon for the installer script to run "c:installer". Bad idea. You see, "installer", although created by Commodore, was not shipped with Workbench. We all had to either buy a commercial program that had the installer on it, or download a freeware program that happened to have the installer in its archive.

Now, back around the birth of Workbench 2.0, Commodore decided that addition to a c: directory, there should be a user directory. The idea is that the CLI programs that came with the workbench would appear in c: and the user-added programs would appear in sys:user. user would be added to the path. This is actually a good idea and many people went along with it, including me.

A few years back when I snagged a copy of the installer, I popped that puppy right in my user directory and never had a problem, installing hundreds of programs. The pov-ray 31 install script, being created with an erronious assumption, had a problem with this.

The fix was easy, just select the povray 31 installer icon, and edit the tooltype field so that instead of "c:installer", the icon is a project of "installer". By not hardcoding the directory, we allow the ever-efficient AmigaDOS to use the path to find installer.

Having thus surmounted this blunder on the part of the POV team, I was able to run the povray 3.1 installation script with no problem.

The main strength of povray is its pure text interface. Also, I do not run the useless bloatware lazy-programmers-crutch called MUI. For these two reasons, I do not use the included pov GUI program. This review, logically enough, will not cover that program.

Having completed the install, I rebooted. Otherwise, the env variables used by povray would not be in effect.

After the reboot, I clicked on the shell and cd'd to the new povray31 directory. At this point I edited the povray.ini file and the old 3.0 povray.ini file, cutting and pasting my customized settings in to the new version.

I then finally ran the program, feeding it a reasonably complicated .pov file that I had been working with on 3.0. Bam. It seems the error checking is a little stricter in one respect: now you need a semi-colon on the end of a color #define. On 3.0 you could get away with this. I fixed that real quick and tried it again. Success!

One other problem I've noticed, again, with the install rather than the actual program operation. From inside a .pov file I referenced an iff file that did not exist. Povray opened a dialog asking for the volume "pov31:". Apparently this is an assign used as part of the povray search path. The installer script did not put this line in the s:user-startup. So I had to manually add the line.

Everything that I've been working on from that point on has been done in version 3.1 and all is cool. Since I've never used the radiousity effects, none of my other 3.0 files broke with the new version.

Also, there is now a 68020/68030 with fpu version. Warning: Previous to now, the '040 and '030 and '020 versions of povray did not use the FPU. On my 68040 machine, I had been running the 68000 with FPU version because it was about five times faster than the 68040 version!

One final thing that annoys me to no end. There is no longer a text version of the povray manual. They include a microsoft word version. (did I miss the release of a new amiga program by microsoft? I don't think so.) Have no fear, they also have a PDF file. That's just wonderful. Another proprietary format that was not released for the amiga. The Amiga, remember that? HELLO!

Well, they got html.

So now whenever I need to quickly refer to a pov-ray command, I have to stop, launch my brower, wait for it to finish loading. Then I have to load up the html file. Gee: where did all my memory go? Browers are slow and are memory hogs. Using a browser to view a text document on your own harddrive is overkill. It's stupid and slow. For pov 3.0 I had the entire manual in one text file. All I needed to do was fire up emacs, load the file, do a search based on keyword. Done! Fast. Emacs and file together in memory take up less space then the browser and run faster as well. Usually I had emacs running anyway, as I was using it to edit the .pov file. I could even cut and paste from the examples in the manual in to my .pov file

On the good side, supposedly the whole macro (recursion and iteration) capability of povray has finally been put in the amiga version. I havn't tried it yet. Dunno if it will replace LParser yet.

In conclusion, I would have to say that povray31 is a good program that is slowly getting more powerful but I think the amiga team needs to learn more about how the amiga works (ie - how to set up the install script icon and the addition of assigns to the s:user-startup file) and they need to realize that text is not dead (text manual is still the best way for Amigans).