The 1st Sprint done!

3 weeks from starting the blog, I finally got something done...here's what happnened so far...


To kick off the project, I had to settle on 4 issues first. In no particular order, these were:


1. Name the project

It is always good to name your project, even a personal, single project. As other projects may appear on the horizon (I need a largel life span, I am afraid...), I can separate everything...


So guess what? For my master thesis at Delft University in 1989, I wrote a distributed ray tracer, and called it DART, as in "Distributed Accelerated Ray Tracer".I guess this name is a good start, and I have picked the project name to be M-Dart, where M is the first letter of my name...

2. Decide the project approach

I was going to use the word "Project Management", but that is silly...I am the only person working on the project, so what's to manage? And since there is no commitment in time, quality and costs, I don't need anything heavy. But what do I need then?

- to be able to set tangible goals and break it down in overseeable chunks
- to roughly keep track of progress and hours spent and planned
- a place to prioritize to-do items, future ideas and issues to tackle, so I don't forget them


Because of my participation in various projects using Scrum methodology, I decided to do something in the spirit of Scrum and Agile:


- Maintain a Product Backlog (PBL) with Items I need to do
- Plan PBL Items in a Sprint (but I am very flexible in the size & time for a sprint)
- Let each Sprint deliver something tangeable, if possible
- Execute the Sprint and review at the end
- Write something on the Blog about the sprint results so far

3. Decide the Programming Language

Now this was a tricky one...I have a great deal of experience with C and a bit with other languages, like Pascal, Fortran, Visual Studio (primarily VB) and some others...yes, I'm old school, I guess...But I really wanted to use a neat OO language, which would also help me in getting back on track in case I cannot work on the project for some time.


C would be out of the question, since it does not support OO. C++ seems to be mainstream OO language for ray tracing, but I don't like it...too much freedom to bypass stuff and error-prone, due to having its foundation in C...As I have followed lectures on Ada'83 a long time ago, I decided to investigate this a bit more. After doing quite a bit of reading up, I landed on Ada 2005 as my language of choice.

4. Decide the programming environment

This was an easy one...Since Adacore recently released a full Ada 2005 compiler (GNAT) and a nice IDE, called GPS, I decided to go for this one. GNAT and GPS is available under a GPL license from http://libre.adacore.com/libre and a professional version can be purchased at http://www.adacore.com/. As the project has little real budget, but spare time, a GPL-licensed development environment like this is just was I needed...


As I am old school, I decided to build a Linux environment and install GNAT 2009 in there. The Linux version is pretty arbitrary, but I decided to use OpenSUSE 11.1. Not for any particular reason though, as most Linux flavours would have done nicely as well...

So my 1st sprint was actually making all the above happen...I now have a development environment up & running and I can start doing something useful! Which is planning the next sprint...The main bits on this sprint would be:


- Getting more familiar with Ada 2005 and GPS
- Develop a simple GUI that allows me to open a window and draw pixels of any colour in it

Keep you posted,

Marinko

I finally started...

Ok, it has been quite some time that I have been thinking about writing a book on Ray Tracing...and I finally started !!!

I wrote my master thesis (Technical University Delft, 1989) on Distributed Ray Tracing, but my professional career moved me away from Computer Graphics and serious programming...But it always was present in the back of my mind and I couldn't resist trying to keep up with developments in the past. The Internet proved to be a massive source on that...

But it was the book "Ray Tracing from the Ground Up" by Kevin Suffern (see http://www.raytracegroundup.com for his web site) that finally pushed me over the edge to start my own project...

Do I want to be commercially succesful with it? No...
Do I want to publish the book? Maybe...if it is good enough...
Do I want to sell the software I will write? No...free for everyone to use it

So why doing this? Well, mainly just for the fun of it, but also to see if I can actually do this...I would like to leave this world with something tangeable that will help other people in having fun with ray tracing and computer graphics...

I decided to create this blog to keep everybody (anybody ???) up-to-date with the developments, although I expect it will take a couple of years...

Hopefully, it will also be a medium for people to comment, exchange idea's and check results...

We'll see...I hope to give some more details on the project this week, e.g. preliminary scope, development tools I plan to use and so on...

Have fun!
Marinko