Second Beta Release of Amiga Port of Greg Ward's Radiance 2.0, Amiga
port by Per Bojsen.

This archive contains the binaries of the Radiance system compiled
with SAS/C.  The binaries requires AmigaOS 2.04 or later.  To use the
shell escape mechanism (!) in scene files, etc., you also need the
APipe-Handler, which should be available in a separate archive or in
the Fred Fish library if you don't have it.

The Radiance system uses the `RAYPATH' environment variable to
establish a directory search path for library files.  If the `RAYPATH'
variable is not set the default value `RAY:lib' is used.  Thus, if you
assign `RAY:' to the directory containing the Radiance `lib'
directory, it should be possible to run the raytracer.

If you want to set up a search path using the `RAYPATH' environment
variable keep the following in mind: the format of the `RAYPATH'
variable is a colon (`:') separated list of directories.  If you want
to include a directory with a colon in its name, then escape the colon
with a backslash character (`\').  A backslash can escape itself, too.
Hence, the default value of `RAYPATH' is equivalent to setting
`RAYPATH' to the value `RAY\:lib' (quotes not included).

This release contain some bugfixes.  In the previous release the
default value for the `RAYPATH' variable was wrong (the backslash was
missing).

New for this release is the AmigaOS version of `rview', the
interactive version of the raytracer.  `rview' currently supports four
different screen modes (lores, lores interlace, hires, and hires
interlace).  `rview' opens it's own custom screen using the maximum
number of bitplanes the hardware supports (AGA is supported when
running under 3.0 or later).  `rview -devices' lists the virtual
screen device drivers `rview' knows about.

All programs are linked with special code that makes it possible to
use UNIX-style quoting, command line pipes, and wildcards even from
the standard Amiga shell.  It is therefore possible to use UNIX-style
quoting and command line pipes in Radiance scene descriptions (when
using the shell `!' escape feature).  This code is configurable with
the `_MAIN_CONFIG' environment variable.  Set `_MAIN_CONFIG' to a
string of option letters selected from the below:

        b  Use backslash as escape character (instead of *) and
           enable C style special control character syntax (i.e.,
           \t for tab, \n for newline, etc., except for octal and
           hexadecimal notation, which is not currently supported).

        q  Allow single quote for quotations along with the standard
           double quote quotations.  Things within single quotes are
           taken literally (i.e., no globbing, a single backslash is
           read as a backslash and not an escape character), while
           escapes (\ or *) are expanded in double quotes.

        g  Enable globbing (expansion of file name patterns) with
           AmigaDOS pattern syntax if `U' is not active.

        U  If `g' is active use UNIX globbing syntax, otherwise
           noop.

        p  Enable command line pipes specified with |.

        P  Enable && and || pipes.

If the `_MAIN_CONFIG' variable is not set the default behavior is
mostly equivalent to the behavior of standard SAS/C programs exhibit
except for some minor bug fixes.  I have my `_MAIN_CONFIG' variable
set to `pPgqb' (I use the standard shell):

    1> setenv _MAIN_CONFIG pPgqb
    1> echo ${_MAIN_CONFIG}
    pPgqb

Some of these features are only relevant when your shell doesn't
handle them for you.  I basically added this code to allow the use of
command line pipes, globbing and more flexible quoting from the
builtin shell.

Any quesions and bug reports should be reported to me using one of the
following addresses:

        bojsen@id.dth.dk
        bojsen@moria.home.id.dth.dk
        bojsen@lenler.adsp.sub.org
        cbmvax!cbmehq!lenler!bojsen

        Per Bojsen
        Maglegaards Alle 51, st. th.
        DK-2860 Soeborg
        Denmark

        Tel: +45 39 66 31 86

By porting the Radiance system to the Amiga I hope to introduce the
many graphics interested Amiga users to a new level of photo realism
in synthetic images.

A special thanks goes to Greg Ward for producing this great raytracing
system and for his easy to port programming style :-)