The IRTC-ANNOUNCE mailing list is now back on the air after an extended
outage.  This announcement covers the July-October 2000 animation winners, the
end of the September-October 2000 stills round and the start of its voting
period (note that the voting deadline has been extended), and two other items
of note:

 * The rule prohibiting progressive JPEG images as entries in the stills
   competition, or as movie posters in the animation competition, has been
   removed.  Progressive JPEGs will be accepted for both uses, although there
   are still some viewers in the world which don't handle them well, so
   proceed with caution.

 * There is now an automated search facility for the IRTC web site.  It
   searches all text on the site, and we do mean *all*.  That includes web
   pages, entrant .txt files, and viewer comments.  Thanks to Chris Cason and
   Bill Marrs for setting it up.  Links to the search page will be added to
   the site soon.  The URL is http://www.irtc.org/search/

==============================================================================

All the votes are in for the July-October 2000 round of the Internet Ray
Tracing Animation Competition, and the winners are:

   First place:   Revenge is a dish best served cold. (dg_alien.mpg) by Duncan Gray
   Second place:  The Early Fly gets the Frog Sandwich (earlyfly.mpg) by H.E. Day
   Third place:   Space Invaders (invaders.mpg) by Neil Alexander

And our Honorable Mentions for this round are:

   Artistic Merit:   Vegetal revenge (vegetal.mpg) by Thierry Laville
   Technical Merit:  Revenge of the Greb (rotg.mpg) by John VanSickle
   Concept/Theme:    Alien Invasion - a How (Not) To (maalspx1.mpg) by Markus Altendorff

The complete tabulated results of the public vote are available:

   ftp://ftp.irtc.org/pub/anims/2000-10-15/zipped-up/results.txt
   http://www.irtc.org/anims/2000-10-15.html

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated in the
competition.  Please join us for the current round!

==============================================================================

The submission period for the September-October 2000 round of the Internet Ray
Tracing Competition is over.  The images are now available for viewing,
voting, and comment at

      WWW:  http://www.irtc.org/stills/
      FTP:  ftp://ftp.irtc.org/pub/stills/2000-10-31/

Note there are no mirror sites for this round.

For the MS-Windows users among the voters, check out Bob Franke's WinVote
voting assistance program.  Details and downloads are available at his site,
"http://www.geocities.com/bob_franke/pov/winvote.htm".  The files it needs are
in a subdirectory called "winvote" in the main ftp area.

There were 89 entries accepted for voting.  If you prefer to download large
bundles, they are available in the directory named "zipped-up", under the name
"images-*.zip" for the images, and "all-text.zip" for the text.

This round's voting interval is 19 days; due to the delay in announcing the
end of the round, the voting deadline is extended through 19 November 2000.
Winners will be announced 20 November 2000.

The November-December round of the IRTC is now open.  The topic for this round
is "Contrast".  You may begin submitting for this round immediately; entries
will be accepted through 31 December 2000.

-- 
The IRTC Admin team