POV-Ray Short Code Animation Winners

Paul Bourke writes "Every year the POVRay rendering community run a short code competition. The challenge is create an image using a limited number of bytes, normally just 256. This year the competition required the artist to create an animation rather than just an image. The winning entries are now online where you can see what can be created for a meager 512 bytes."

Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror

[augustz]

If you are going to link to what looks like a single machine that is supposed to serve up loads of videos, a mirror would be nice in the story submission :)

bad summary?

[friedman101]

Seems to me like the challenge is to create a script for "POV-ray" that is less than 512 bytes to create a cool animation. Title lead me to believe that some of those animations were under 512 bytes which would have been totally amazing.

512B pov-ray? Screw that!

[Xtense]

POV-Ray? Screw that, see what can be made in a 256B EXECUTABLE. Just to give some popular examples, tube/3SC [pouet.net], PHOBIA/ind [pouet.net]. Yup, the demoscene was there a long time before, and still it churns out some beautiful code that boggles the mind. Nothing impressive to see here though, just a fat-ass raytracer with a small input file.

Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that!

[neumayr]

Heh, yeah, let's keep the fire going:
Utilizing OpenGL/DirectX you say? So, the code's 15 or whatever bytes long, but dynamically linked to a huge library. That's not so far removed from interfacing with a raytracer, at least it's a lot closer to it than the demos you originally posted.

I personally never did anything for Povray - honestly I didn't know it could do animation before this story. But given the range of quality of the animations in this contest, getting anything done in a 512 bytes Povray files seems to be a noteworthy achievement.
So, let them cheer :)

Re:Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the days people looked at timestamps and moderated the first guy up, and the second guy "redundant". What happened to Slashdot? Gotta penalize those who repeat a comment, whether it's plagiarism or not bothering to read the thread.

Re:Latest FLOSS weekly about POV Ray

[pthisis]

Incidentally, the most recent FLOSS Weekly podcast (with Randal PERL Schwartz) is about POV-Ray. As usual interesting:
http://www.twit.tv/floss24 [www.twit.tv]

That's pretty odd considering that the POV-Ray license, while quite liberal, is not open-source. The podcast erroneously lists it as such, and the podcast doesn't correct that (at least in the first few minutes). The POV-Ray license in particular prohibits much commercial distribution (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 6) and allows a revocation list of people/distributions who are not allowed to distribute at all (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 5).

I don't want to give the impression that the POV-Ray team is against open-source/free software. There is a lot of thought towards a GPL'd rewrite by the POV-Ray team, and the main reason it's not open-source is that the license predates any real definition of open-source or free software in the modern sense and there are too many contributors to relicense easily.

I just want to point out that the POV-Ray license is not currently open-source, that's a known issue that the developers are trying to address, and it's odd for a podcast dedicated to FLOSS not to mention that up front (and indeed to erroneously list it as open-source on the intro page).