Re: please try POV-Ray and VRML terminals (Re: Now working on POV-Ray terminal)

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Sunday 03 April 2005 08:08 pm, KITA Toshihiro wrote:
> I announce the first release of the patch to add povray and vrml
> terminals to gnuplot 4.0.
>
> http://t-kita.net/gnuplot_povrml/
>
> Any comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

The patch on your website is the patch you are talking about?

It does not fit well with the design of gnuplot.
Although you call these "terminals", in fact the terminal
routines are just place holders, leaving the real work to be
done by stand-alone routines that have to replicate all
the data-handling and plot evaluation that the gnuplot core
routines currently do.

Such a design would be very hard to maintain, even if it were
fully working. Every change to gnuplot's internal data structures
or plotting capabilities would have to be made in parallel to the
normal core routines and to these new povray and vrml routines.

Therefore while this code is interesting as a proof-of-principle,
I think that in order to progress towards inclusion into gnuplot
proper all or most of this code must be moved into actual terminal
driver routines (POVRAY_init(), POVRAY_options(), POVRAY_move(), etc).

In the long run I think you will find that will be much simpler anyway.
Let the existing core routines do the hard work for you.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington 98195-7742