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.