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1.1 What is MegaPOV-Ray?

MegaPOV-Ray (also known as "Patched POV-Ray") is the standard "offical" POV-Ray package with alot of "unofficial" patches.

Eventually these patches will be worked into the next "official" release of POV-Ray.

I decided to to an OpenVMS port of MegaPOV-Ray since the advent of the "OpenVMS Hobbyist" program as may a good and powerful Alpha and VAX system are showing up on the hobbyist market looking for something to do.

Here is a list of new features in MegaPOV-Ray.

Cut-Away Textures For CSG. (new in 0.5) Transformation Enhancements. (new in 0.5) Speed Optimizations. (new in 0.5)
pigment_pattern. (new in 0.5) Inverse Transformation Patch. (new in 0.5) Fast Macros.
Post-Processing. (updated in 0.5) Blinn highlighting. Photon mapping. (updated in 0.5)
Radiosity improvements. Reflection energy balancing for variable and Fresnel reflection. Fixed bugs with normals.
Motion blur. (updated in 0.5) Persistent scenes and presistent variables for animations. Media improvements.
Image Pattern. Reset Children Warp. Double Illuminate.
Solid Triangle Meshes. Dispersion. New fractal patterns.
New Mesh Syntax. UV (surface) Mapping. Isosurface object.
Function patterns. Patametric object. Sphere sweeps.
Rational bezier surface. New bicubic_patch evaluation. Splines.
Slope-dependent textures. Variable, blurred, metallic, and fresnel reflection. Spherical, cylindrical, toridal, and planar warps.
Light groups. Isosurface pigment function. Unicode font support and bugfixes.
min_extent, max_extent. trace() function. new crackle features.
facets pattern. projected_through modifier (virtual lights) eval_pattern & eval_pigment.
chrono and date. proximity pattern. Smooth-texture triangle mesh.
object pattern patch. Sphere camera. area_light improvements.
Isoblob object. Isosurface enhancements. Another kind of spline.
no_image and no_reflection modifiers. Text object alignment. New patterns (blotches, cells, bands and shee)
Polarical pattern. Triangular pattern. Clock keywords.
Image size keywords. Turbulence vector. vtransform().

1.2 What is the current version of MegaPOV-Ray?

Currently the "offical" release of MegaPOV-Ray is v0.5.

The OpenVMS port of POV-Ray was done using the Unix POV-Ray v3.1g source code base and the MegaPOV-Ray v0.5 patch kit.

Note: MegaPOV-Ray is NOT supported by the POV-Ray development team and is considered to be an "unofficial" version of POV-Ray.

1.3 Where can I get it?

The "official" POV-Ray distribution source code site can be found at ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Official/Unix/.

The "official" MegaPOV-Ray distribution source code site can be found at ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Unofficial/MegaPOV/megasrc04.zip

The "official" MegaPOV-Ray v0.5 for OpenVMS distribution source code can be found at http://www.ourservers.net/public/vms/povray/vms_megapovray05.zip

1.4 Where can I go for further information?

The BEST site for more information on POV-Ray in general along with documentation and extra bits & pieces of scene code can be found at the POV-Ray - the Persistance of Vision Raytracer.

You can also get help from the UseNet News group comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing.

For GREAT help and information about MegaPOV and POV-Ray you can check out the POV-Ray News Server at news.povray.org

1.6 How do I submit patches or bug reports?

If you detect a bug in the copile/link scripts, or make some improvements or have any comments on the OpenVMS code, send an e-mail to Robert Alan Byer.

I will try to answer any and all questions and problems, but I can't make any guarantes and will try to the best of my ability.

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