distributed rendering

[CARVALHO Luis Passos]

Hello Christoph,

> 
> I agree that with a render plugin framework and perhaps some other 
> architectural changes a cleaner support would be possible. 
> But just trashing 
> my work and wait at least another year (in Nove Hrady it was 
> looking like 
> that the next KDE version will be based on Qt 4) would be quite 
> unsatisfactory.
> 

I very much doubt Andreas wants to trash your work. Also why must we wait
for KDE4 to release a new version of kpovmodeler? The fact that we release a
version with kde3.2 doesn't mean we'll have to wait for kde4 to release
another version.

In fact, I'd like to have your distributed rendering available as soon as it
is finished. However, as far as I can tell from your emails, you only show
the image when it is finished. Also, the user has no idea how far along the
rendering has come.

Isn't there a way to know for example, the number of segments to render, how
many are being rendered and the average time of rendering per segment? There
is nothing worse than waiting while looking at an empty screen.

> So, my changes are quite small I think and can be easily 
> removed when a new 
> design/implementation is in place. But for the meantime we would have 
> distributed rendering support and gain experiences how this 
> feature is used 
> and what people want.
> 

Granted, your changes are very localised and don't lock us down to any kind
of design/implementation. However, and don't take this the wrong way please,
one thing I hate about Windows, for example, is when they rush an incomplete
feature out the door just to say they have it. I would much prefer if they
took the time to mature it in house and then release it when it's complete.

I take pride in the fact that when people work with kpovmodeler, they have
to work very hard, and be very critic to find something wrong in the
application. I wouldn't like to loose that.

Andreas,

How about if, after the release of kde 3.2 we commit our pending work and
release an alpha so that people can have and provide feedback for the new
functionalities?
No need to focus on stability apart from garanteeing it works most of the
time. ;)

> As for the progress information: I can offer to display the 
> data of one row in 
> the grid as soon as it is available. E.g., rendering a 
> 300x200 image with 
> distribution tile size of 100x100 would show you in the 
> beginning the upper 
> half (300x100) and in the next step the lower half of the image. 
> But I still need someone to explain me, why the output of 
> *.tga file (e.g., 
> cat file.tga) is shown bottom up in KPM.
> 

That would be better. At least the user would see something happen.
Also, don't forget we need the chapter about distributed rendering for the
documentation.

> I hope that my code will be included in the next release! Let 
> me know what you 
> think about it...
> 

Even if it doesn't, I'm sure it will be released in less than a year (kde4
or not ;) ).

Regards,
Luis