[Radiance-dev] I'd like to create a branch for the project

[Greg Ward]

Hello Mayur,

Thank you for your generous offer of help.  In Radiance, what we  
mostly need assistance with at this point is porting work to the  
Windows platform.  Specifically, we need to replace some of the Unix  
system facilities, such as subprocesses, interprocess communication,  
and file locking, and make these work under Windows via system- 
independent interfaces.  In addition, we have a few programs that  
produce graphical output using OpenGL or X11, which we need to get  
ported to Windows.

Here is a partial list of separable tasks we need to complete, for  
which we have scarce resources (quoting Georg Mischler):

  lock files
    Very easy to split as a seperate subproject with a clearly
    defined and simple API. High priority in my opinion.

  Persistence for rtrace and rpict
    Introduce an abstract level in rt/persist.c, so that fork/exec
    can be hidden and replaced with an equivalent on Windows.

  Parallel rendering
    Introduce an abstract layer in rt/raypcalls.c and rt/r[pt]main.c,
    so that fork/exec can be hidden and replaced with an equivalent
    on Windows.
    Among other things, this would make it possible to port ranimove.

    Introduce an abstract layer for next_process() in rad.c, so that
    fork/exec can be hidden and replaced with an equivalent on Windows.

    Introduce an abstract layer for putpiece() in rpiece.c, so that
    fork/exec can be hidden and replaced with an equivalent on Windows.

For the graphics porting, we have three programs, the third of which  
would be significantly more challenging:

rvu driver
     Need to be able to write out 24-bit colored rectangles and take  
textual user input.

ximage
     Need to port X11 picture display program to Windows

rholo
     Need to write OpenGL display driver for interactive holodeck system

If any of these seem interesting or doable to you, let us know and we  
can fill you in with more details and provide you with a starting  
point in the source tree.

If you are principally interested in lighting simulation and graphics  
algorithms, as opposed to the more systems-related work we have  
slated, you are welcome to take the source code and experiment with it.

-Greg