The Virtuality Renderer Copyright (c) 2001 Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva 0. Legal information This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. It is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions, see the file COPYING for details. 1. What is it? The Virtuality Renderer is a program that accepts a scene description in a procedural language and renders a raster image representing that scene. It is a console application, which tries to do just one thing: render scenes, but this is not a simple task. It is being designed to be modular and extensi- ble from the beginning, to allow the inclusion of new shapes and rendering algorithms. The input language chosen is Lua (http://www.lua.org/) for it is procedural yet has enhanced data description capabilities, is very small and easy to embed. 2. Prerequisites 2.1. The Lua language This is an interpreted language developed at the PUC/Rio University, in Brazil. It is very simple yet powerful. For more information and software, visit http://www.lua.org/. 2.2. The zlib and PNG libraries These libraries are required for the generation of raster images. They were chosen because of their availability (if you are running Linux you proba- bly have them) and license. But if they are missing, try http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/. 3. Installation As this is a simple package, just try: $ ./configure $ make and, with super user privilegies: $ make install There are some test scenes in the tests subdirectory, that you can try before installing the program. 4. Contact information If you want to contact me, to send ideas, suggestions, patches or bug reports, send an email to asandro@lcg.dc.ufc.br.