What's New in POV-Ray 2.0
-------------------------
The following is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of every
new feature, but should give experienced users a pretty good guide
of what has been changed and what has been added. Please refer to
POVRAY.DOC for details.
General:
-------
- Automatic bounding slabs for greatly enhanced rendering speed of
most scenes.
- Adding, subtracting, multiplying & dividing of floats & vectors.
- Clock global variable for external animation support.
- X, Y, and Z global vector constants.
- Improved antialiasing routine with new commandline options.
Commandline options:
-------------------
- Version switch for backwards compatibility.
- Starting/ending column/row switches for trace window.
- Relative/absolute values for trace window switches.
- Antialiasing jitter scale value and toggle.
- Number of antialiasing rays to shoot.
- Internal "clock" setting for animations.
Objects:
-------
- Soft pnenumbral shadows from extended area lights.
- Smoother Bezier patches.
- New simplified torus syntax.
- Heightfield water_level now uses range 0-1 instead of 0-255.
- Heightfields can now be clipped and used in CSG operations.
- Heightfields can be phong-shaded with the "smooth" option.
- New, improved finite cylinders, cones, and discs, with
optional "capping" of cones and cylinders.
- More versatile CSG unions have replaced the need for composites.
- CSG texturing has been made much more flexible.
- New "merge" removes internal boundaries between transparent
unioned objects.
Textures:
--------
- Hexagon pigment texture.
- Radial pigment texture.
- Mandelbrot pigment texture.
- Texture attributes grouped into 3 independently scalable groups:
pigment, normal, and finish.
- TIR (Total Internal Reflection) for more realistic refraction.
- Fractional Brownian Motion (fbm) turbulence controls.
- Turbulence can now be used independently with any pigment or normal
texture.
- Optional vector-style turbulence values.
- Background coloring.
- Color maps can now be declared.
- Frequency, phase keywords now available for use with color_maps.
- Filter keyword replaces "alpha", letting us reserve alpha for other
uses in the future.
- Less restrictive distribution policy. See POVLEGAL.DOC for
details.
IBM PC Video:
------------
- VESA 1.2 spec implemented for preview graphics in the IBM DOS version.
Gives VESA support in most 8/15/24 bit modes.
Should support: 1024 x 768 x 256 color palette
800 x 600 x 15 bit high color
640x4 480 x 24 bit true color
- Diamond 24X 15 and 24 bit mode support added.
- Preview reduced to fit selected video screen size if necessary.
