Hi,
our volunteer Sarith Subramaniam is currently working on objline.py.
When trying to test it, he noticed that the NREL releases do not include
the supporting meta files in lib/meta. Since they do include the
executables that require those files, that seems slightly suboptimal...
But it shouldn't be hard to fix. Just copy over "ray/lib/meta/*.mta".
I've found a previous mention of the topic here:
http://radiance-online.org/pipermail/radiance-general/2015-October/011273.html
Some unsorted thoughts on the topic of meta files in general, given that
due to the availability of objline.csh/py, and some newer tutorials, they
will inevitably get more attention in times to come:
A few messages down the above thread, Greg mentions the undocumented(!)
envvar "MLIB". The first thing running through my mind seeing this was:
"This must be the worst possible name for an environment variable, ever"
(way to generic).
I also never quite understood the point of inventing yet another
proprietary vector format just for Radiance. Or are such meta files used
anywhere else that I'm not aware of?
They do not seem to be the same as the ISO standardized "Computer Graphics
Meta Files" (http://www.fileformat.info/format/cgm/egff.htm), which would
be a possible candidate for something like that.
Another possible approach would be SVG (or a suitable subset thereof),
which has excellent support libaries available nowadays.
Of course, I haven't looked into how much work it would be to use either
of those (or yet something else), so this basically just amounts to me
ranting at the moment without any real purpose. But I'm still just curious
what the motivation behind this format was (or which format it actually
is), and what other people are thinking about possible alternatives.
Cheers
-schorsch
ยทยทยท
--
Georg Mischler -- simulations developer -- schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+ -- lighting design tools -- http://www.schorsch.com/