CompuServe Messages

Dave, Yeah, I'd pretty much come to the same conclusion about the variable variables. I agree with most of what Rick Miller says, about creating a .PRJ to d/l for those who want to participate, with but one quibble. I agree that we need a longer render time now, so that down the road, rounding to whole seconds doesn't become a bigger error factor than it already is. Just for the fun of it, I took a bunch of numbers for relative processor speeds that have been floating around and (with the dubious assumption that MAX for Alpha code would render at the same rate as R4 code) came up with approx. 14 secs. for Chevy @ 640, mapping on, on a dual 300MHz Alpha setup. This figuring has a lotta holes in it, but it's defensible. (I'll elaborate if you're interested…) I mention this to show what we'd be up against if we wanted to put together a single frame that took 1 min. to render on this setup, without the use of slow IPASs like Vapor. But getting it with a higher resolution than 800×600 is going to keep anyone with a 2-meg video card from participating. The reason I'd come up with 640×480 was to include 16-meg machines w/o a swap file, but as it turned out, I only recall one respondent with 16 megs. Lots of people, however, are using 2-meg video cards. A possible better solution (since we're already talking about a special .PRJ) would be to just put more stuff in the scene… I thought of using PCACITY.3ds off the WCT, but even at 640, it creates a 7-1/2 meg swap on my 32-meg machine. Since so many of the respondents had 32 megs, it's probably too big. Maybe somebody else can chime in… SCL