dort is a physically based renderer. It is still under heavy development, so do not expect it to be usable in general (and correct in particular).

dort carries most of its dependencies in the repository (in extern/), the only library that is necessary by default is libz.

To build dort, one also needs a C++ compiler (clang and gcc should work), objcopy (part of GNU binutils), and tup. tup can be downloaded from http://gittup.org/tup/, either as a build-it-yourself repository or as a Ubuntu package.

The build can be configured using file tup.config (see the template tup.config.default). By default, only the development version of the program is built; other versions can be enabled using CONFIG_FAST=y (fast, optimized build) or CONFIG_SLOW=y (slow, debug build). The different versions of the binary will be built in different directories:

• development version -- build/d/dort
• fast version -- build/f/dort
• debug version -- build/g/dort

To build all enabled versions, run tup. Use tup build/{d,f,g}/dort to compile only a single version.

If enabled, dort can also link to Gtk to support a simplistic GUI, but this is somewhat deprecated and will probably be removed in the future. Otherwise, the only runtime dependency is to the default libc, other libraries should be linked in statically.

The produced dort binary is a Lua interpreter that exposes the rendering API in Lua. To run a Lua program, invoke dort <program.lua>.

To obtain the documentation of the Lua API, install ldoc and run ldoc . in the repository. The generated documentation will be stored in .ldoc/. We do not publish the documentation on a public website because dort is not quite ready for this yet.

Example Lua scripts that render images are stored in the samples/ directory. Do not be deceived into opening examples/! It contains various files that have been used during development and that were convenient to store in git.

Some historical images documenting the progress of development can be found in images/.