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1995-01-01
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Persistence of Vision Raytracer
Version 1.0
Bug Reports
-------------------------------
This document describes the best method for reporting problems and
then list some known problems with POV-Ray.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Reporting Problems
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The best method for reporting problems is to create the smallest
possible scene file that duplicates your problem and post it as
a message in CompuServe's COMART forum section 16 along with a
description of the problem. All of the POV-Team regularly checks
in there, as well as many other intelligent, talented people who
love to help out. Most problems are solved very quickly this way.
Alternately, you may send mail to any of the primary authors
listed in POVRAY.DOC, "Contacting the Authors".
We receive many great letters with compliments, suggestions, and
problem reports. The problem reports are often very vague and
difficult to pin down. POV-Ray is a very complex program and it runs
on many different computers. To find the cause of a problem, we
need as much specific information as possible and hopefully, a
small scene file that demonstrates the problem. Here's a list
of info that would be helpful to send to us when reporting a problem:
1: What is your computer setup?
1a: What is the software and hardware configuration of your computer
1b: Have you tried using the simplest configuration of your computer
to test the problem? (ie. no memory resident software, no tricky
utilities loaded.)
1c: What version of the software are you using? (ie. 1.0ibc 1.0tc5)
2: Have you experienced this problem on another computer?
3: Have you heard other reports of this problem?
4: Has this always been a problem or did it ever work correctly before?
5: Can you pinpoint the problem to a certain line or block of
lines in a scene file?
6: Can you reliably duplicate the problem and describe the steps to
duplicate it?
7: Have you experienced the problem in more than one scene file?
8: Are you experiencing the problem with one of the executables released
by the POV-Team, or is this your own compiled executable?
9: If you have modified your personal copy of the source, can you
duplicate the problem with an unmodified copy of the source?
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Known Problems
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
:: Height fields used as clipping shapes may cause the program to
abort with an error. Height fields are not meant to be used as
clipping shapes currently, so this problem is low priority.
:: Roughness 0 will cause the program to abort with a math error.
:: Very low values of roughness ( <.001 ) will cause math errors
on some computers, notably the Amiga.
:: Scaling any component by zero (scale <2 0 3>) will cause the program
to abort with a math error.
:: The IBM-PC display code autodetect is not perfect. Try using
different display modes described if IBMPC.DOC if +d0 doesn't
work correctly for you.
:: Error messages are often cryptic. See POVERR.DOC for help with this.
:: Blobs and quartics will not always render correctly. Noise appears on
the screen or holes in the shape. This is caused by numberical
inaccuracies in your computer. Try adding the sturm keyword to the
shape's definition to use a more accurate, but slower method of
computing the shape. This won't always work, either, and you
may just have to use a different shape.
:: Layered textures don't work correctly with tiles or material_maps