The MTV RayTracer

MTV as previously released to USENET was fairly simple. It could do simple primitives (polygons, spheres, cylinders and the like) and read Eric Haines' NFF format as spit out by his Standard Procedural Database package, which formed a convenient testbed. I placed the source code into the public domain, and hoped that others would play with it, extend it, and keep me informed as to interesting uses that they found.

After a brief flurry of interest, there seemed to be nobody using it. Small surprise to me, since there were obvious limitations, and soon after this a series of other raytracers came out (DKBTrace and Rayshade) which had people pushing their development (I was mired in the world of functional programming languages for my thesis while working on two different programming jobs). I was under the impression that nobody was using it.

I had released my raytracer into the public domain in the hope that the spirit of freely sharing information with others would spawn further work and result in an improved product for all, acknowledging all the contributions that the authors had made. Unfortunately, I have come to find a number of people who have either in whole or in part decided to use MTV in various ways (demos, books, etc...) but who have made no effort to contact me about it or make their extensions available to all. It has irritated me to open books and see code that I wrote copied verbatim from MTV source. For many years I had resisted the GNU practice of copylefting, claiming that GNU software comes with a price and is not free at all. Years later, and wiser, I have decided that perhaps they are correct. Future versions of my software will in all likelihood carry a GNU-like copyright, to ensure that any commercial use of my raytracer is at least known to me.

Well, I have complained enough. Click here to ftp the original source code for MTV. I have more recent versions that I have hacked on that include Bezier patches and other improvements that I could release if there were sufficient interest.