A tiny tip coming from a friendly place, if I may- your comment comes off as slightly pedant and elitist. I'm sure it was not in your intention to bring down the original author of this demo, who is probably very excited about what he worked hard on, but rather to highlight how deep of a field raytracing is and to encourage him to not be content with this first venture into it, and to explore more of it.
A good way to do that is to write your comment from a "Yes and..." perspective, rather than a "Yes but..." perspective. In one case you're showing the author how tall the wall front of him is, in the other you show him how you yourself climbed that wall when you were in his position.
and you find a blog with 1.5 semi-coherent posts and a shitty sidescroller? :-)
I'm not criticizing the author or his work, I'm just saying that writing a recursive function that does p + kv recursively shouldn't take a lot of code. Do I need to end each comment with a smiley face to prevent it from being taken the wrong way?
I agree with you, it's not a very complicated thing. But that's the beauty of it - raytracers are simple but produce stunning images (it is a raytracer, though - it traces rays! Plus it does ambient + point lights, reflections, shadows... the kind of stuff raytracers do)
It doesn't take a lot of code, sure. But "a cross-platform game framework in 100,000 lines of C++" is not the current fad in HN ;)
I don't think it's a matter of adding a smiley at the end of each comment (although I love smileys, so I do that too :-)
I think it's more a matter of saying "Yes, good job on figuring out how to do p + kv recursively! Here are links to {papers|books|lectures|other code} that go further if you want to explore this topic more" rather than saying "Oh, you figured out how to do p + kv recursively, just like millions of other CS freshman. Good for you".
It's the little details that make online communities pleasant :)
A good way to do that is to write your comment from a "Yes and..." perspective, rather than a "Yes but..." perspective. In one case you're showing the author how tall the wall front of him is, in the other you show him how you yourself climbed that wall when you were in his position.
It helps a lot :)