Aggregation of Possible Next Steps

Aggregation of Possible Next Steps

As living documents, there is always more polish and more refinement that can be achieved in the existing Ray Tracing books.

This can get in the way of expanding the series. There are unquestionably many--a seemingly uncountable number of--ways that the series can be appended, expanded, and iterated.

Looking to the future of its development, we have decided to collate all previously existing suggestions for expansion. This is an area of the book that could use some polish (other one!).

As an example, the final chapter of Ray Tracing in One Weekend is entitled "Where Next?" and contains a list of possible places to take your newly formed raytracer.

When In One Weekend was published, it existed as the sole book standing on its own. Including a list of places for exploration naturally keyed into the philosophy of the text. However, as additional books in the series were created, a problem emerged. Many of the suggestions offered at the end of In One Weekend are present in Ray Tracing: The Next Week. Some, however, are noticeably absent (specifically; shadow rays, triangles, and parallelism). In addition, The Next Week does not contain a chapter devoted to next steps, whereas Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life contains such a chapter.

So, we have a chapter in book 1 that contains a list of possible next steps for your raytracer (some of which is implemented in the next book). A book 2 which contains no such list. And a book 3 which contains such a list, but has no implementation for any of it.

Adding to this complexity, the books launched with a blogspot in tandem. http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/ was created with the goal of suggesting and showcasing raytracer projects that could be completed in one weekend. For every book in the series: In One Weekend, The Next Week, and The Rest of Your Life, a blog post was written that contains additional (mostly distinct) suggestions for each chapter in that book. There are dozens of ideas in these blogs, not to mention the wealth of information contained in the comments!

At present, the complexity of this collection leads the author to be unable to recommend following any of the suggestions.

The wiki contained here is an attempt to wrangle all of these suggestions into a single moldable document, with the aim of redesigning this aspect of the series.