[Radiance-general] raypcalls

[Greg Ward]

Hi Ignacio,

This thread probably belongs on the development group, where I'm  
cross-posting.  Please respond from that list.

There is no call to explicitly kill child processes in raypcalls, but  
you could add one.  It would also be possible to modify the ray_pclose 
() call to explicitly kill its children rather than waiting for them  
to return after end-of-input.  We wouldn't be able to report status,  
but it would be unusual (and probably irrelevant) for an error to  
occur during process termination, anyway.

In a command-line program, using Control-C normally kills all  
processes in a group, and so would lead to early termination for  
children without the wait.  In the latest version of rvu, rather than  
killing the child processes when the user begins input, I take their  
input while the children crank away in the background, then process  
the user command after waiting for the remaining rays.  Normally, the  
delay is not noticeable with this approach.

Best,
-Greg

> From: Ignacio Munarriz <info at aisarquitectura.com>
> Date: February 6, 2009 7:15:58 AM PST
>
>
> I am using raypcalls library, and i was wondering if there is any  
> way to stop the calculation without waiting to the rays in the  
> queue to finish and discard (ray_pdone), i mean, there are  
> sometimes that you have high rendering parameters and the first few  
> rays are very slow, so i would like  to "kill"  the processes or  
> something similar ...