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   The IRTC CDROM (Year Four) is a compilation of all entries made to the Internet Raytracing Competition during its fourth year of operation. As the IRTC is bi-monthly, this covers round #18 (May/June 1999) to round #23 (March/April 2000). There are over 700 images and source archives available.

   In addition to the entire year's worth of stills submissions, the CD also contains four quarterly animation competition rounds (Aug 1999-Jul 2000).

   The Year Four CD, like that of Year Three, has a stills index that covers every entry ever made into the IRTC from its inception in 1996 to the cut-off date of the CD. In this stills index, all thumbnails are held on the CD itself, with links being made to the image or source files either on the CD or on the IRTC website, depending on the date of the entry. (Entries made prior to May/June 1999 are on the IRTC website, the others are on the CD, along with all winning images from any stills round, no matter what the date).

   The CD has an entrants index that lists every competitor who has ever entered into the IRTC stills competition. This index is available in three forms ; sorted alphabetically, sorted by best score, and sorted by average score. Each entrant has their own HTML page which lists each of their entries sorted by date, by best overall score, by best technical, best artistic, and best concept/theme score.

   Each stills round has an improved viewing page that incorporates, with each entry, its submission text file and the judges comments. When viewing the entries in each round, you can sort them alphabetically, or by overall, artistic, technical, or concept/theme score. These viewing pages and indexes are present for all stills rounds, not just the ones held on this CD. Where the HTML page refers to a image that is not on the CDROM, it is fetched from the IRTC website (this assumes that you are connected to the internet at the time).

   Almost all the stills submissions are 800x600 (or larger) pixel JPEG's, and all have a text file accompanying them giving author's details and an explanation of the image. In some cases, that explanation is quite comprehensive. Additionally, many authors chose to provide the source to their images, in the form of data files for whatever renderer that they used. In most cases, the renderer of choice was POV-Ray v3.1, and thus there is a large collection of POV-Ray 3.1 scene files on the CD.

   The CD is ISO-9660 compatible with short (8.3) file names. It should work on any operating system that is capable of both reading a CDROM and hosting a web browser. On Windows 95/98/NT/ME/XP/2000, if you have a web browser properly installed on your system, the disk will auto-start when it is inserted into your drive.

   Unix users please note: your CD filesystem needs to be able to map the files on the CD to lower-case. With Linux, this is simple (see the check=relaxed option to mount(8) for more details).

   The disk, in total, contains over 680 megabytes of data and is well worth the US$29.00 asking price. This CD is being produced to help support the administration and running costs of the POVRAY.ORG and IRTC.ORG websites.