AltME groups: search

I'm afraid alittle ozone maker isn't going to do much, though I haven't 
studied them and their effect on mold.

We had to do attack the mold in our last apartment repeatedly over 
the course of several months. Nothing we had would keep it away for 
long, so we just sort of wore it down to something that was easy 
to clean

What is the good that ozone is supposed to do for you?

Reichart has already invited us to do this...

If someone does choose to do it then i would recomend working with 
Sunanda with it and get up on REBOL.org...

Having fun reading through the rebol.org scripts and getting an idea 
how to do things

I'm too lazy to do all that typing :-) .......I copy them to the 
clipboard like this:
    do http://www.rebol.org/library/public/lds-local.r
    res: lds/send-server 'get-script [base-convert.r]
    write clipboard:// res/data/script

I would like to do that too.

mmmm... I don't think I have another way... I really do need to compile 
it, one way or another..

REBOL cuts out the bureacracy of UML and implements direct.  Schler-Mellor 
and Grady Brooch have some "noble" goals (but the devil's in the 
implementation), but have never faced anything as powerful as REBOL 
yet for implementation.  I saw Mellor talk once, and he did a great 
talk on "orthogonal behavior" which is apropos.  I think the way 
to utilize their mess is to do it simpler in REBOL, call it UMLR 
and teach them the future.

Thanks Gabriele, I'll do that tomorrow, when I get back to the company, 
I'm doing it for.

So we asked money.cz representative to come and explain few things, 
and we've got Director himself. He agreed that there is some limitation 
and was surprised, when I showed him Rebol, and small parser for 
few dealer pricelist. He said that was exactly his idea someone would 
do something like that and that it could be sold. He liked the way 
we think (the rebol way) and he wants to teach us more about S3 to 
become sales partner for some customers ...

This was asked for a couple of times in the past.  Currently AltME 
does not have a way to do this.  It is on the list though.

Reichart, ever since Altme came out, you've been speaking of the 
"list".. not sure how many years so far.  What was the last update, 
scrolling?  If you don't want to update Altme, that's your perogative, 
but the "soon" and "it's on the list" vapourware speak only bears 
on your reputation.  I know.. I do the same thing :)

I'm not really interested in debating with you, and other than this 
last statement on the topic I won't.  I'm only responding because 
there are a lot of new people here who might not be clear on the 
facts.


Vapourware is "New software that has been announced or marketed but 
has not been produced." We have been produced, people use our software, 
and it sells.  


Nor do we market or claim any of the new features people ask about. 
 People ask, and we tell them whether it is on the list, or if we 
are going to add it to the list.  We don't commit ourselves to a 
date.


You might not like these facts, but your accusations are inflammatory 
and baseless.  

The facts:


AltME came out as Beta, and we systematically brought it past version 
1.  We met our needs and goal.  If you would like something updated, 
I will give you the bank account number to transfer funds to, we 
can set a rate, and you can have any update you like.


We have never said no to any idea for AltME, we discuss them, and 
log people's ideas so that when we make changes, the ones most asked 
for are reflected (this group here on Rebol3 is not our only source 
of input).


If you do not like the rate with which we make changes, or the reason 
we make changes, then this is going to be a painful environment for 
you to remain in.


Otherwise I will state again, we are active on the development of 
an update to AltME, and we have no set date.   


If you would like to ask a constructive question I will always do 
my best to give a clear answer.  If you simply want to needle and 
dig at us, then I can no longer engage you.

You guys have done a great job with AltME. And it's free for us here! 
I can't think of any reason to complain. Quite the contrary: Thank 
you!
(If I needed something more, I should do it myself.)

Reichart - no such reaction was needed imo :-) Terry imo did not 
want to be strictly inflamatory. But guys, let's realise one other 
thing - once someone is trying to point out something, we imediatelly 
give the answer - if you need more, do it yourself, you are free 
to do so ... BUT! That is very incorrect marketing answer ...

I also received email from one earlier reboller, that rebol's image 
is hurt also because of how do we aproach development (and the person 
in question meant product which has impact - Rebol itself, altme) 
... ppl could not be simply sure what exactly is going to happen 
and when.....

I will comment (for what it is worth) a little on AltMe's improvement.


If you guys have paid attention to Carl's reply on the DevCon Q&A...one 
of the things he highlighted is that /Platform is sold to SafeWorlds...(which 
is AltMe).


Draw your own conclusions there. Again, Reichart's commetns that 
they do things as they seems fit and of course $$ rules still applies.

Why would AltME "start" crashing.  Do you belong to more than one 
world?  Can you confirm that it is really AltME?  As in, does it 
only crash in this (big) world, and never crashes in a smaller world?

I completely understand your reasoning,

But, in our universe we:


1. Make change systematically from a giant list of features and bugs. 
 The means multiple people checking in code that is often changed 
several dozen times and overlapped by different people.


2. The once compiled, an array of computers and operating systems 
are cleaned (often reinstalled from ghosted images of hard drives) 
and sent through a complete test suite.  


3. If anything fails…the team has to be taken off what ever they 
are working on at that moment.  Then repeat the test cycle.

This is what we release as Alpha or Beta.  Gamma is a nightmare.


These realities are interleaved with all the different products we 
work on.  It means that before we do a release candidate of anything 
we have to weigh our test-team's schedule, confirm the majority of 
developers are available.  And not just for the release, but everyone 
has to hang around for the next couple of days because after release 
there is a high chance someone will find something.

Wouldn't it be just a hour of work or so
 

No…

We have a very low bug rate (we have won awards for it.)


We take it very seriously.  On one side it means things can be a 
pain in the ass (especially for us).  On the other side, what we 
do release is much better.


One thing it does cause though is for everyone to focus and gather 
up all the things they want to change at the same time.  Sort of 
like knowing that you have to put all your stuff on one boat every 
day to set sail.  If you miss the boat you have to wait a day.

Would a web front-end (with similar functionality to AltME) increase 
accessibility? Or can the functionality of AltME be subsumed into 
QTask? (which is already web-based and has messaging, calender, to 
do lists, etc)


I've seen first hand how readily people will "try out" something 
online (forum, wiki, members area, etc) but shy away when asked to 
"download this software to get access". I think part of the problem 
stems from most Windows users fear of installing any software that 
is available over the net (they still trust and prefer CDs from "reputable" 
companies).

Out of the blue: how can I browse to links published on AltMe, without 
having to type then over? A left clik on the link does not do anything, 
a write click  copy the link, but is not passable into the browser, 
and the link is not selectable...
I'm using Linux Mandriva 10.2 and Firefox.

We are working on updates for AltME, and we really want to nail this 
dot bug.


It is hard for us to see, so anything you can tell us about it will 
help.

Your connection type and platform being key.
Mine is T1/Windows MCE


One of the key questions is, when you start up a world, AltME syncs. 
 When the bug happens (which I assume means you see no groups turn 
red), did you see it sync?

Do you see anything odd happen bellow the line that says "Rebol3 
as <name>"?

Does the progress bar (the vertical space to the left of the icons) 
fill with red?

If we can see a pattern, we can nail this.

this may not be relevant, but right now I'm on 56k because my broadband 
is down. the broadband antenna can let me ping probably 0.1% of the 
packets correctly, so I can't do anything, but AltME allowed me to 
connect anyway (amazing I think, when ping hardly works!). but everything 
of course stops right after logging in, e.g. just before syncing 
with the groups being greyed out.


I also get funny errors, such as that the "REBOL3 world doesn't exist", 
when trying to log in.

Maybe it has to do with that text clip bug that was found mentioned 
recently ?

In response to Graham:


Yeah, I got that, and I'm saying your full of it for calling it buggy. 
 And more so, I'm saying you are mischaracterizing the issue, as 
well as what he said.  This is a pet peeve for me with you.


For the record: Carl said "they seem to work pretty well"  and they 
do!


Calling AltME buggy is simply untrue in the context, or in reply 
to what he wrote.  


It has a few bugs, but it is far form buggy.  Tomb Raider for example 
shipped with 3,000 known bugs, 280 critical crashes.  FireFox has 
more categories for bugs that AltME has bugs.  


We do agree the key bug here isn't even AltMEs, but Rebol's.  AltME 
still crashes less than any one of the other apps I run every day. 
 Thunderbird crashes twice a day on me.  I stopped using outlook 
all together.  Word has a hissy fit about 4 times a day on me.

Mike, for the record, this is a gray area.  I am in fact saying Graham 
is full of crap, but for a subjective opinion.  To actually be an 
attack of him as a person (ad hominem) I would have to say something 
about him, as opposed to about his method.  This is a rather meta-argument 
because the very thing I'm attacking is his debating skills. 


I happen to treat software as people (my own quirk), since it embodies 
the spirit of the creators.  As a result a consider some statements 
attacks.  I'm fine with a factual statement. But if I do not call 
attention to this, it becomes lore.


Gab, there is not a perceived lack of on-going development, there 
has been in fact almost no development for long stretches of time 
on AltME.  That simple.   Does not address the issue, and a disagreement 
is not a flame war.  I have too much respect for Graham to flame 
him.

I used to run altme all the time at work until they clamped down 
on all firewall and proxy ports. I found it to be the ideal program 
to log progress on tasks I was doing but now it wont connect. I only 
need it to do the do name or world resolution as the server would 
be running inside the firewall too. No data traffic needs to flow 
outside the firewall. Reichart - is it possible to have a local name 
world name server our enable the name resolution to be proxied through 
http, and I could just plug in the corporate gateway/proxy?

Guess not. What I want to be able to do is start a world inside the 
firewall and then only have clients inside it connect. The clients 
would need to know how to resolve the world name and IP address thru 
some mechanism that doesnt require going out of the firewall to do 
so or allow the name resolution and server declaration protocols 
be proxied through http. I think that should pass through most corporate 
firewalls.

Good. But on my system (debian) something sometimes removed that 
link and i had to do it again. which is why i used the package.method. 
it somehow detected the link-name did not match the library-version.

There might be a way to do it using the system port, but then that 
might be platform specific (ie. probably Windows-only) for now.

One thing that always annoys me about AltME is the connect/disconnect 
handling.

Everytime I get disconnected from the internet (which happens several 
times a day), I drop out of the group that I am reading, and have 
to acknowledge that I read the message that I AltME "isn't able to 
connect at the moment". Of course, when I go back to the group I 
was reading, the markers for new messages have already been cleared.

Same when I try to reconnect "Do _really_ want to reconnect to rebol3????" 
Of course not, what do you think why I clicked there? And then I 
drop out of the group ...

Yes... And I think that has something to do with a connection interruption 
on my side... clapping Ethernet ;-) the sync was finished but did 
not show it all.. I had to enter "something" in a group and then 
I synced and showed me the messages...

unable to do anything with it..

Just an idea, do you think that it can help to send you zips of the 
AltME dir after a crash?

Reichart, I know this is on the "list" but do you think we'll ever 
see the Altme "minimize to the system tray/little window notifying 
one of a message." for windoze? My MS compadres insist that they 
need it. Bill Gates must put some kind of addictive substance in 
icon tray. But I guess once you get used to being notified that way 
it's a hard habit to break.

Kaj, tried it, but it only exports the current messages that are 
in the current group I'm in. What I would like to do is actually 
to resync the groups I'm interested in. Unfortunately, I had to post 
dots in some of the the groups, and I ge disconnected in some of 
the groups. :-(

Mmm.. Some of these groups are web-public, so they are obtainable 
through the web here
http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/


otherwise with a bit of analysis maybe we could try to transplant 
some chat files over to your computer.

Just one question; what version of AltME do you have written at the 
top of your window ?

As a new REBOLer, I want to "gather" every bit of information I can 
get, especially from the posts, but the groups which I believe would 
be very helpful to me have more than 1000 posts. Through the web 
site, I can't read the earlier posts, and I get disconnected from 
the world everytime AltME resyncs these groups. I have noticed that 
groups with less than 500 posts do get resynced w/o being disconnected; 
although I had to "force" the resync (that's why I had to post the 
dot in several groups, as posting in the dot group doesn't sync me 
to all of the groups).

So you still have the problem after setting it to 100?  Also, what 
type of connect do you have, and where (in the world) are you?

But how do i uninstall it? It doesn't show up in the add/remove programs, 
and when I run the downloaded program, it automatically connects 
to REBOL3?

Yeah, so probably better just to move the altme files that you have 
somewhere safe, then run altme.exe again and do a full install.

I just Quit and restarted. No new syncs. I noticed that the groups 
do get synced once a new post is made. That's why all I was posting 
were dots a few days ago. Will try and copy the downloaded group 
files to the new AltME location...

If my history is set to 100 and I change it to 1000, do I get to 
see the other 900 messages?

Edgar -- I cam think of two drawbacks to that suggested forced resyn 
method:

1. the files themselves contain the request: " DO NOT MODIFY!" in 
their header, so perhaps Altme can forsee bad consequences if we 
do

2. the resync problem appears to mainly affect those on dial up connections. 
Possibly, that means the issue is related to Altme timing out a slow 
request. So there is the likelihood that resyncing a large group 
completely will simply fail midway.

I did try a variant of your suggestion: I renamed one of the *.set 
files to *.txt (the request does not say "DO NOT DELETE OR RENAME!")
It didn't work.
I ended up with an empry group.

I supposed I shoudl have dotted it to see if it'd've resynced.....But 
that was the problem we're trying to solve :-)

Wow.........it crashes!?!  


OK guys, you need to shove all this into the Feedback, becuase all 
I do is copy and paste this stuff over to the site myself, since 
it is built to track all of this.

Rebolek, did you do any hardware changes to your machine recently 
?

If not, maybe it's time to open the case and see if everything is 
plugged in properly. Check RAM, PCI cards etc. are seated properly

there is not much to do, but sometimes posting something in the dot 
group helps syncing. sometimes logging out and in again helps, but 
not always

I think what we might do is set this to 100, let people change it, 
but only while they are in session.  When they exist, set it back 
to 100.

Most "people" don't have a sense of community.  On other hand, I 
invited one person that now has brown a world to about 20 people, 
they have been "living" inside AltME for about 1.5 years now.  They 
can't even imagine using anything else, since they do play with everything 
else.  It is simply a preference.

Henrik;

  I use it for just three or four people to keep track of a to-do lists. 
   Has worked for us for a couple years, albeit with some problems 
  in keeping the world going.  The To-Do lists are very helpful.

Gordon, try to simply re-register the world name ensuring that if 
the world was on port 5400 to not have any other AltME worlds running 
(server or client).  If you do this it will reregister that world 
to the closest available port (this would be 5400 in your case).

Is 'load allowed to modify source data? In all /View with sound support 
(on Windows,) when you do:
my-sound: read/binary %my-sound.wav
snd: load my-sound

'my-sound is modified! So successive 'load will return samples with 
bad data

which is what I had to do to circumvent this problem.

Pekr, those patches still have issues to be dealt with; they are 
very complex, affect a lot of things, and do not have a lot of discussion.

where do I find the docs for hide (like to hide a password typed 
in?)  I know I have read it somewhere...

Did Cyphre ever release his agg_lite.dll with text rendering as he 
said he was going to do for devcon?

what do you mean by text rendering? Text rendering in terms of draw? 
Imo now biggest drawbacks for general View usability are - incomplete 
keyboard handler + non-existance of rich text. I think that Carl 
could come up with some solution, where face/text rendeing could 
be switched to use agg capabilities internally ...

I guess I can call agg-view.exe to do the graphing that I want

re Round2 - you can do it as follows: round/to number 1e-2

what does translate 2x2 do in agg-view?  Does it add 2x2 to each 
point until ..a new pen is used?

using a time event is like multitasking whereas your quick and dirty 
way makes it difficult to do anything else ...

I asked Anton directly but some of you may know a work-around. I'm 
using his scroll-table style but when I call a face using it within 
a reblet it does not "do" it. It works from the command line with 
a "view face" but not within. Is there something akin to "reduce" 
which would, for lack of a better phrase, force a face to recompute 
itself entirely? I tried "show" and "focus."

Is there someway to do this.. 

X: [btn: "test" [print "test"]]

view layout [ X ]

It's trickier if you've already usd layout to convert the dialect 
to VID objects -- then you need to read up on make-face and similar 
functions.
Pre build, just do things like:
x: [button "hi" [print "hello"]]
y: [button "bye" [print "goodbye"]]
z: []
append z y
append z x
view layout z
>>

Terry, you probably need a lot of Composes in that case.

The Vid dialect has ti survive the Do's, so you may need to use more 
lit-words  {'button rather than button)

You said you might need to Do it firstL
Try
 x: [quit]
 do x
to see the problem here if you do need to use do first.

Hello, I have an app that calls another app with a "do %..." The 
problem is that when I want to exit from the first app after closing 
the second, I am left at a command line as if I called the app from. 
Any one know how to do a double exit?

perhaps i do not understand what you want to do, but if the goal 
is building a growing set of styles, i think that this is the standard 
way:
x: stylize/styles [a: field] []
x: stylize/styles [b: field] x
view layout [styles x a "style a" b "style b"]

I have done a lot of work to improve layout.r  and more to do in 
the future...but it is a good system, better than commercial products.

I think Sunada has thought to do some download statistics for scripts 
people download.

You know the "btn" style? How do you adapt that to say, a toggle 
button?

The problem is that today REBOL is doing everything itself. It is 
making the socket connection, sending the GET command, etc. In the 
process, it has to know everything about the proxy settings and do 
everything natively.


I am proposing adding new HTTP/FTP support that uses the Win32 API. 
No more socket communication within REBOL -- instead, Win32 does 
everything, including interacting with proxies.

To clarify: I made a mistake above. There is nothing in get-net-info 
that needs fixing. The single question is: do you want a Win32-specific 
refinement that changes the read or write to use the Win32 HTTP/FTP 
API, and consequently enables full proxy support?

Josh: the point is not what this solves, the point is that the same 
script will not work across platforms if we end up using a different 
function for each platform to do the same thing. now, since read-thru 
already does something similar, it looks like a good target to me. 
i'm not sure about a refinement to read, since in that case i guess 
it would be a hack or you'd rather need a new port scheme.

Both my FF and IE browser returned 217.6.  I think it might have 
something to do with your Locale settings.

I've installed the Rebol plugin (hand installed by copying the *.dll 
files to the rebol directory) for Firefox and it is listed in the 
"about:plugis" page and shows that it is enabled but I'm still not 
showing a red-blue image on the .../web-plugin-install.html page. 
  I've restarted the computer (W2K-SP4).  Any suggestions?  Do I 
need to install an ActiveX plugin for Firefox as well?

we all wait for RT to bring more info ... when Carl left for vacation 
in France, Josh told us, that he was redirected to do another things. 
No further info yet, just Carl noting somewhere here, that they worked 
on plug-in security issues or what, which was found as a necessity 
...

Why to wait, all people here can do: do http://...to run it:-)

It cannot be appreciated without the appropriate data. If you will 
each send me a picture of yourself (jpeg file), then I will see what 
I can do. Can the files be sent via AltME file sharing? I've never 
used it and would like to put it to a test.

Oh, and along with your photo please send a wav file telling who 
you are, what you do, and why you like programming in rebol. Limit 
the length to 1 ot 3 minutes. No porno pics or bad language, please. 
Not I think any of you would ever do anything like that.  :>)

I reinstall plugin but it is the same - here some more explanation:

I can not to get to run the new version of script in rebol plugin 
- always getting old version, despite I changed version values in 
both files (web page and script)

Yestrday I solved it so that I saved script with new name - than 
it worked - I could by changing version values run new version of 
script in plugin.
But today with the same file can not.

I have web page for plugin:
>>>>>>snip<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<html>
  <head>

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-10">
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="PRIVATE">
  </head>
  <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">

<OBJECT
ID="RPluginIE"
CLASSID="CLSID:9DDFB297-9ED8-421d-B2AC-372A0F36E6C5"

CODEBASE="http://www.rebol.com/plugin/rebolb7.cab#Version=1,0,0,0"
WIDTH="240"
HEIGHT="85"
BORDER="1"
ALT="REBOL/Plugin"></center>
<PARAM NAME="LaunchURL" value="rmapsconsole03.r">
<PARAM NAME="Version" VALUE="1.5.0">
</OBJECT>
  </body>
</html>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>snap<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

and script in the same directory

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>snip<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
REBOL [
	Title: "Rebol Web Kartes"
	Version: 1.5.0
	Author: "Janeks Kamerovskis"
]

mapsize: 400x300
imgType: "JPEG"

mainWin: layout [
	t1: text "AAA"
	button 200x20 "Atvçrt" [
		do smoething
	]
	do [
		t1/text: "Text changed"
		show t1
	]
]

view mainWin
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>snap<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

>> do as-string to-binary mold logo.gif
== make image! [100x24 #{
25252514141414.....

After installing what do I have to do next

I'm not sure if understand what do you want. If you want to leave 
page and come back without stopping plugin inside the page - it's 
not possible

henrik, I don't seem to be able to retrieve values from javascript... 
how do I get values FROM do-brower .... do you know?

I just discovered Tim Wylie's Wrapper for the rebol plugin. It works 
for FireFox3 Google's Chrome and Opera. It allows you to have multiple 
rebol apps running in seperate draggable windows inside the browser 
window. I tried it on opera mini and although the "dock and Application 
laucher windows show and app windows open the apps do not seem to 
run. I'm not sure how the wrapper works if its on the server side 
or client side. It worked on a fresh install of opera without me 
downloading the plugin dll (but it may have been there from a previous 
experiment.) 
Anyone know if opera mini could run this?
This could be a great way to get rebol apps on my mobile phone

I was able to use it on my linux box with firefox. I know there is 
know plugin for linux firefox and I do not have any form of the plugin 
on that machine.

I asked Carl to free plugin source several times, sadly with zero 
response each time I tried. I think that plugin was not part of RT's 
revenue stream, so it is a pity it never happened, as someone could 
pick-up, do some fixes, improvements, etc.

.. of course - Hue helps. I was sort of hoping for a palette that 
was maybe generated from scientific data, or an artistic eye. I was 
hoping to locate a website with palettes for different metals etc. 
Someone out there must be doing it. Just trying to locate such information 
is difficult because coming up with specific enough search keywords 
is hard in the sea of information about colour. But never mind, never 
mind, I can do it myself - I think it's faster :)

I'm not entirely sure about that. The emitted light wavelength depends 
on the temperature only on first approximation. the "room temperature 
color" is reflected light, which has nothing to do with the emitted 
light. Of course there are other variables, but I don't see them 
significant in this case.

I don't think I mentioned what I wanted the colours for - a progress 
bar. After consideration, I've pretty much decided that a large range 
of colours such as cooling metal might go through might actually 
be bad for the user interface (unless extreme measures are taken 
to make it really look like molten metal, like a computer game programmer 
might do), because all those colours might be confusing, and some 
of them (eg. red) may signal warning, etc. (especially if the user 
hasn't seen the progress bar before - I don't want to present the 
user with a circus of colours). Fading from white to solid blue is 
what I'm using at the moment, and I'm thinking white might be too 
bright.

May I suggest that:


- Starting with just cold metal - metal is not a single colour.  
You are seeing many colours at all times, and different patches of 
colour everywhere.  You are seeing colours reflected and you need 
a coefficient table to calculate the reflection index.  Copper for 
example would lean heavily towards red.


- Next, heated metals are the same, meaning, not a single colour 
either, but now for a different reason.  But to produce the illusion 
of something burning hotter and hotter will require something that 
is multi-pass, and changing constantly.


In video games to produce the afterburner on a jet we did a few tricks:


- The jet flame itself was made of a cone-like shape (maybe a dozen 
polygons).

- The cone was set with an alpha channel so that the source was close 
to opaque, and the tip was close to translucent.

- A second cone was placed around the first cone, but just slightly 
larger.

- They both undulated at all times.  In other words, the length was 
always changing for both cones independently just slight.  And when 
the jet went faster and slower, they changed from long to flat (with 
the plane itself).

- The textures on the polygons were already a rainbox of colours, 
but as the jet changed what it was doing, the colour pallet was changed. 
 Again, both cones were not always changed at the exact same time.

- Just behind the jet (but depending on your angle of view), several 
filters (polygons that read the bg info and render again) would be 
used to create a small waiver and a refocusing.  The more GPU you 
had, the more of this you could do, and the better the final effect 
would look.

- Lastly, and this is what makes the whole thing amazing in a 3D 
game.  We are always checking the location of bright things, such 
as the sun, or things like the after burner filling your screen. 
 If so, we change the contrast of the whole world, and flare out 
your iris.  In the case of the sun we throw up a lens flare, and 
darken all the ships in the sky.

Even as a 2D problem, you should attach this the same way.

This video I think drives this all home for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHL94qQgl_8&feature=related

also don't forget that light is additive,  so sometimes, all you 
need to do, in visual effects, is add up an immense number of very 
dark particles.  where they are tightly packed, it will create a 
ball of white, by iteself.

Maxim,
do http://cyphre.mysteria.cz/a-star.r


that is my very old script I used for prototyping when developing 
strategy games couple of years ago. It's not optimized as it is just 
prototype before conversion to Java but it kinda works ;)

the gamma issue is a standard "senior artist" debunking test for 
high-end effects artists  hehe


tell the (often ego-filled, highly paid) artist to a simple pan a 
starlit field (a simple sky shot at night).   he will LAUGH and tell 
you that's its an easy thing to do...  and then watch him struggle 
with the results, if he doesn't know his theory.


what happens is that as a pixel is distributed across several pixels, 
it will dim. as the pixel gets closer and closer to a 1:1 position 
with another pixel it will pop right back.


you must pre-amplify the "energy" of the light before panning, and 
then bring it back down... which, depending on the image & screen 
will usually be a value between 1.7 to 2.2.

another thing that people do not often realize is that our eyes are 
also not linear...  you can see each 8 bit step in the dark areas 
of an image, but can skip 5 steps within the brighter areas of an 
image without noticing it.  which is why we always notice image compression 
in very dark parts of DVDs and not in the bright parts of it... 


its very surprising to me that many compression algorythms get this 
wrong straight out of the bat.