Tim's Links and Utilities Page

Last Updated 6/27/2001

POVray 3.1 Macros and Objects

This is a macro for 3.1 that joins the merge of two cylinders with a squashed difference of a torus. There is quite a bit of math behind clipping this CSG to match properly, and now it's made easy. Great for bicycles and pipes. (1k zip of pov w/demo)

POVray 3.0 Plug ins

	A standard round spring made of spheres with it for completeness, and the real beauty of this one, the mesh spring generated by POVray #while loops with some simple variables to control the looks. Just click to download. (627 byte zip)
	Some daffodils with various random settings so they are unique. Mostly made of scaled blobs and some twisty daffodil leaves. Just click to download. (1435 byte zip)
	Here are some pillars I've designed, I may add to these in the future. 5/29/97 Just click to download. (1249 byte zip)

Links

Here I am again! Wow, it's easy to let these pages sit for a long time! Anyway I've upgraded to Netscape 4 and so far I've managed to avoid any troubles with my, now aging, 486/66 system. Of course they were bought out by AOL before this great browser could really become the standard. And the spammers have got their hands on the managers, so stuff like Smart Download will grab for an ad stream when you download with it, and the darn spammers have lies about how that doesn't affect your download, but it does grab for bandwidth, not enough to show unless you are on a slow system though. And when you check mail it grabs for ads too. Other than that it works pretty slick. The editor has a nice spell checker and I haven't seen it crash yet, unlike Netscape 3's editor. Oh, one feature of 3 that I wish was still there was the ability to keep from grabbing for more than four files at one time, that prevented it from eating up system clock time and stalling. Sometimes when it has a big list now it comes close to freezing, but usually recovers, (unless PovRay has dinked with the system priorities).

Besides, I've been using Naviscope as an anti-ad screening proxy, and that seems to keep most of the garbage away. I suppose I should look around for hacks and patches for Netscape 4 to get rid of the ad spam. I really like the new filter feature, between that and the one my internet provider has I can keep the marketers down to a dull roar.

PovRay 3.5 is due out anytime "soon", at least they have finalized the requirements of what is in it, it should look quite a bit like the unofficial MegaPov patch that seems to have quite a few users. Hopefully soon I'll get a new computer with enough speed to try out some of the fancier things like the U-V mapping. Hamma Patch came out with a new version, but it seems to require DirectX 8.0a, and last time I touched DirectX I was happy to get my computer away from it alive. I'm not exactly sure why I need a piece of software that will attempt to emulate 3D acceleration hardware with CPU cycles I can't really spare. Is the point of that to make everything even slower?

MUD

Egad! Netscape 3 is so great, until it crashes and makes you lose hours of work! I should remember to save
more often. Too bad MicroSoft is pushing junk like FrontEnd that they can charge an arm and a leg for.
I was trying out some RTF to HTML converters, one worked OK, but required odd formatting (you pretty much
need Win Word of some sort to use it) and another had a slick interface, but lousy output, so I'm still stuck
with Netscape. Maybe I'll try a higher version, it's been a while. Explorer on the other hand even lacks support
for pop-up mail!

Lately I have been MUDing again. My favorite MUD is Aesir, they are nice there. My alter ego, ZIcon, is a
short little gnome made of stone. It's fun to role-play with others of like bent. I use SimpleMU, it has handy
triggers and hot keys. Some people prefer Zmud from Zuggsoft, it has auto mapping, but the interface is
more complex. I'm putting up a page for ZIcon, that's what got me started updating my links. (almost all were
dead!).

I also have been working on writing a database for mud items, MUDbase. Which is in JAVA. I used card file (comes with windows) for a while, and that works nice, but it only does text searches. *Update* This is near complete but of so so quality and there is little I can do to improve it, it's the fault of Java, I need to find a good reliable compiler to do windows stuff with, that DJGPP lacked a reliable windows AWT, and all links to getting that from MS for free were laughable, don't they know that MS hides the good stuff from the public, so you will want to buy their compilers? I have heard a slow version of Borland C isn't too crippled, I'll need to find room for that on my HD next.

Dos Tricks

If you are anything like me you don't want to give up Windows, but are tempted by all the hacker talk of Unix.
You aren't a dummy, it's just that you don't have access to Unix. Sure Unix is still competing with Windows
on the workstations, but Windows 2000 may change even that (justice department willing). So I've decided
to document some little known features of Windows here in my link section:

1) from a DOS window, while online, you can type "PING SERVER" to see the LAG of the connection. Where
SERVER is a legit domain, for example "ping asgard.viviano.net". You will see 4 response times.

2) from a DOS window, while online, you can type "TRACERT SERVER" to see the route that your connection
takes from your provider to the SERVER (a legit domain). For example "tracert 216.48.19.246" will show the
route to asgard.viviano.net, most of the servers between you and a site will be restricted, but now you can know
which provider in the connection to blame for your dropout lag. (I.E. Inter path)

My friends put up an awesome web page, the LAN Gamer's Home page, which has lots of neat stuff on just about every cool game. All the 3D shooters, Doom, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Duke, Redneck; and stuff on Warcraft, Command and Conquer, Carmagedon, Rocket Jockey. (Dead Link) This site really was OK, but
now is gone. I'm sure he's busy playing Half Life, Team Fortress, Quake 3, and EverQuest. Actually mostly EverQuest now, staying up to all hours and completing epic quests and stuff, really addictive.

CAVEAT MACHINOR! (programmer beware)

In 96' I answered a solicitation that was posted in news:comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing for someone to work making graphics for a Windows 95 upgrade/port of Global Conquest which is a strategic war game intended to be played either against the computer or via internet against other opponents. Originally this game was released by Micro Prose as a 16 color DOS game (available as shareware at the site) but was to be 256 color. They even had a JAVA chat room on their web page. The game was intended to be out before xmas 97, but ... I spent many hundreds of hours re-doing stuff for this cheesy program, with no leeway as to what graphics to redo, and they still turned around and split without paying me the very small amount I had foolishly agreed to accept!

PovRay Links

Check out the Official POVray Page. POVray (Persistence Of Vision Ray tracer) is probably one of the best graphics programs of all time; there are some programs around that do the same sort of thing... some say better and some say not, but those programs by and large cost into the thousands of dollars (3DStudio, Renderman) while POVray is FREE and has a comprehensive manual that comes with the program, and a lot of support in news:comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing (my favorite news group).

Also see the IRTC (Internet Ray Tracing Competition). There you can view many spectacular pictures and get an idea of what can be done with 3D renderers and raytracers, mostly POVray, but there are others as well.

Many people like to use front end modelers for POVray instead of the POV script. One of the best is Moray. Moray saves its editor files as MDL, but it will export to POVray and Polyray. The main disadvantage of using a front end is editing the object by hand afterward, Moray uses a right-handed scene layout when POVray's default is left handed. Also objects are scaled to size instead of being created at the final size. Current versions run in DOS, but a windows version is in the works.

Another front end modeler for POVray is Breeze Designer. Breeze uses a left handed system, but it still scales to size, doesn't fully support cones, and the CSG support is weak. Still, it is shareware and runs in windows.

Then there are object specific tools like sPatch, sPatch is a very well done bi-cubic patch editor that exports to POVray. It has a simple 3d preview, runs in windows, and is easy to use. Unfortunately bi-cubic patches gobble up memory, simple objects can often replace them without bogging down POVray where a bi-cubic patch would.
The site is gone but the tool lives on, try Dom's 3D page, he has a nice tutorial for sPatch.

There is Blob Sculptor, which is good for making blobs. Unfortunately it doesn't support cylinder components, or scaled components for export to POVray. And it does support cones, which will not export to POVray. Try
Robert's Freeware page for this.

For height fields there is hf-lab, a DOS utility that can create random terrain, and has many built in manipulations for height fields, like smoothing. John Beale also wrote orb-cyl which will wrap a height field around a sphere or a cylinder. These are simple command line DOS programs, perfect for making asteroids.

To design textures sometimes I use Texture Magic which is an OK way to do textures, but I prefer to do them by hand. However it does have a handy way to make tile-able image maps, and runs in windows.

The WayCool FLIC Screen Saver is a great way to make your own animated screen savers. Unfortunately,
the programmers at Full Volume Studios have gone insane! Good luck making sense of what they say!

I use a lot of different programs! If any of these links are out of date just E-mail me about it and I'll try to find where it went to. Due to increased SPAMMING I can no longer hot link my E-mail. At its worst I have received
over 40 spam mails daily. By comparison in the last five years I had maybe 50 hits a month on my Shadow
Warrior page, and only 5 legit E-mails, less than one tenth of one percent of visitors. So E-mail me!

(timothyea *at* worldnet.att.net)

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