Extensions and patches to
POV-Ray 3.6 / MegaPOV 1.2 for Unix

Linux framebuffer display patch
Unix render frontend patch
Unix source configuration patch

Nicolas Calimet <pov4grasp@free.fr>

Updated Aug 29, 2006

Screenshot of POV-Ray rendering at the Linux framebuffer console (with mouse) using colored and formatted output messages. binary
Click for full-size (330 KB)


The unofficial extensions and patches presented here are designed specifically for POV-Ray 3.6.x or MegaPOV 1.2.x for Unix. These patches mostly concern the building and usage of the program rather than creative, scene-design features. In some rare cases they may fix minor glitches found in the platform-independant POV-Ray codebase (in principle nothing worth worrying about).

The patches are available in source form and are independant from each other. They are applied seperately to the source code of POV-Ray or MegaPOV for Unix; refer to the installation instructions. Unofficial POV-Ray and MegaPOV PC-Linux binaries including the latest version of each patch are also provided for testing purpose.

Questions and comments regarding these patches may be posted on the povray.unofficial.patches newsgroup (news.povray.org) or sent to the e-mail address above.

Linux framebuffer display patch

Requirements

This patch requires either POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Unix or MegaPOV 1.2.1 for Unix (source distributions only).

Description

The Linux framebuffer display patch allows POV-Ray to directly use the Linux framebuffer device for displaying the rendered image at the console screen. This feature is thus very similar to the existing SVGA display capability but generally offers more flexibility. It has the same advantages over the usual X Window display, in particular low resource usage (no need to run an X server just for display purpose).

Features

fb
Click for full-size (72 KB)
  • Supports framebuffer color depths of 8, 15, 16, 24 and 32 bits per pixel (bpp) in TrueColor, DirectColor, and PseudoColor (8 bpp only) visuals at any screen resolution (depending on the framebuffer driver and hardware capability)
  • Supports alpha channel transparency
  • Supports console switching
  • Supports console mouse via the gpm/libgpm server/client interface
  • Automatic or user-defined positioning and downscaling of the display
  • Single-keypress controls for display view/hide, render/pause, and screen dump (screenshots)
  • User-supplied background image a la X Window display (gray/white checker by default)
  • User settings controlled via environment variables or command-line options

Download

Latest version: 0.7.2 [Changes] [Installation instructions] [PC-Linux binaries]
Patch to POV-Ray Patch to MegaPOV
2006-04-23 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.7.2.diff.bz2 (22 KB) megapov-1.2.1-fb-0.7.2.diff.bz2 (22 KB)
2006-01-09 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.7.1.diff.bz2 (20 KB) compatible with megapov-1.2.1
2005-12-12 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.7.0.diff.bz2 (19 KB) not tested
2005-10-28 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.6.0.diff.bz2 (17 KB) not tested
2005-10-06 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.5.0.diff.bz2 (14 KB) not tested
2005-09-05 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.4.0.diff.bz2 (11 KB) not tested
2005-08-24 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.3.1.tar.bz2 (136 KB) -
2005-08-18 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.3.0.tar.bz2 (136 KB) -
2005-08-12 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.2.0.tar.bz2 (136 KB) -
2004-08-30 povray-3.6.1-fb-0.1.0.tar.bz2 (78 KB) -

Unix render frontend patch

Requirements

This patch requires either POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Unix or MegaPOV 1.2.1 for Unix (source distributions only).

Description

The Unix render frontend patch changes the default "look" of POV-Ray for Unix by adding color and formatting capabilities to the output text streams (render status, statistics, and so on). Stream colors and formats can help selecting useful information, either visually or by means of text filtering (e.g. through the standard Unix grep utility). Since version 0.4.0 the patch also offers a replacement implementation of the generic ASCII text display used to monitor the rendered image when a graphics display (e.g. X Window) is not available.

This patch should work on any terminal that supports the standard ANSI escaped sequences for color control (xterm, the Linux console, and many others). Similarly, the ASCII text display will properly work on terminals that are able to perform cursor addressing and line insertion by using ANSI control sequences.

Features

frontend
Click for full-size (24 KB)
  • Support for an improved ASCII text display in the form of a 77x22 character array
  • User-defined text/background colors a la GNU ls for each POV-Ray stream
  • User-defined stream formats (prefix-formatter-suffix) for each POV-Ray stream
  • Automatic or user-defined text wrap width (defaults to terminal width)
  • Automatic or user-defined tab stops (defaults to multiples of 8)
  • User-defined tab mark (plain character or character code) that can be left or right aligned
  • Fix non-working stream redirections in official POV-Ray 3.6.x
  • User settings controlled via environment variables or command-line options

Check out the user manual for details.

Download

Latest version: 0.4.0 [Changes] [Installation instructions] [PC-Linux binaries]
Patch to POV-Ray Patch to MegaPOV
2006-03-22 povray-3.6.1-frontend-0.4.0.diff.bz2 (17 KB) megapov-1.2.1-frontend-0.4.0.diff.bz2 (17 KB)
2006-02-13 povray-3.6.1-frontend-0.3.0.diff.bz2 (13 KB) compatible with megapov-1.2.1
2005-12-30 povray-3.6.1-frontend-0.2.1.diff.bz2 (11 KB) not tested
2005-12-20 povray-3.6.1-frontend-0.2.0.diff.bz2 (11 KB) not tested
2005-09-05 povray-3.6.1-frontend-0.1.0.diff.bz2 (8 KB) not tested

Unix source configuration patch

Requirements

This patch requires either POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Unix or MegaPOV 1.2.1 for Unix (source distributions only).

Description

The Unix source configuration patch improves the build system (the configure script and friends) used on Unix-based platforms to compile POV-Ray / MegaPOV for Unix from sources.

Features

This patch is featureless, i.e. it does not enhance the program itself with new capabilities. See the list of changes linked in the next section for details.

Download

Latest version: 0.2.0 [Changes] [Installation instructions] [PC-Linux binaries]
Patch to POV-Ray Patch to MegaPOV
2006-04-12 povray-3.6.1-config-0.2.0.diff.bz2 (43 KB) megapov-1.2.1-config-0.2.0.diff.bz2 (8 KB)
2005-09-05 povray-3.6.1-config-0.1.0.diff.bz2 (1 KB) already included