Yesterday I posted a demo that showed the creation an interactive world consisting of ray traced boxes. Since that is just a demo, there were limited things you can do with it. Yes it’s a working demo, but it is not yet a useful tool.
For example, you can’t use it to add or delete a box, or to change the color of a box. You also cannot assemble your own boxes together to create a higher level composite shape, like I did with the chairs or table or lamp or the people in the scene.
But having a working demo is a crucial early step in creating that sort of fully functional tool. The demo shows the kind of thing such a tool could produce in practice, and it also illustrates the quality level of run-time performance.
Compared with a demo, there are many more design decisions involved in creating a fully functional tool, because there are so many more things that a user is able to do. But going from working demo to working tool is usually a good idea, because the result empowers many people, not just one.
I think I’ll work on that. 🙂