[Radiance-general] dtp-rad

[Jelle Feringa / EZCT Architecture & Design Research]

Am I far out of line adding to this discussion that dtp-rad is probably one
of the worst things that ever happened to the general radiance project?
The power of Radiance is exactly that it is founded on Unix principles,
rather than relying on some GUI to abstract the complexities involved in
lighting simulations to the user. I think we should take a position on this
list and to strongly discourage anyone tempted to use dtp-rad. It's a corpse
of the nice (naïve? )intention to encapsulate the power of Radiance in a
GUI, and choose (god forbid) acad as a place to do so... 

There is a ton of tools that will allow you to work perfectly with Radiance
on win32, but dtp-rad is *NOT* one of them! If you need a positive
definition of what those are, I'm happy to re-iterate those.
There are many competent converters out there, and many project that present
a good interface to Radiance (brad, conrad, schorsch.com)

Can I suggest that perhaps it would be great to have pointers to these
varies projects on the official radiance site, or perhaps
radianc-online.org? Radiance on *nix is pretty straightforward, and is a
different  audience from the win32 platform, where it is *far* more
difficult to set up a decent Radiance workflow, rather than the configure,
make, install routine. I think this knowledge needs to be condensed
somewhere soon.

Cheers,

-jelle