One week ago I downloaded a starfield from Aminet which consists
of polygons with 6 edges. Because the object was in TDDD-format (triangles)
and I had to render a scene using Lightwave I wanted to merge the
polygons. So I tried out PixPro which needed a lot of time and
finally destroyed the object.
O.k., I said, write your own one.

The program reducer is the result (of some hours hacking C-language). It's
faster than PixPro and produces a starfield I can use.

Summary:
 Advantages:     -speed
                 -external small program which can be invoked
                  via batchfiles,...
                 -merges only polygons which remain to same surface
 Disadvantages:  -the fast (GCC-)version crashes after a stack-overflow
                 -It can't close polygons which use one edge two or
                  more times, e.g. the front-face of an "O"-letter

                         /-----\
                        | /---\ |
                        | |   |-| <- edge used twice
                        | |   | |
                        | \---/ |
                         \-----/

-----------------------------------------------------------
Author:

                         Andreas Maschke
                         Zenkerstraße 5
                         06108 Halle/Saale
                         Germany

                   Phone: ++49 (0)345/5170331
                   EMail: epgbc@cluster1.urz.Uni-Halle.DE

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                 8875   16508  53.8% -lh5- dfad Nov 22  1995 Reducer/reducer
[generic]                 1321    3240  40.8% -lh5- a522 Nov 24  1995 Reducer/Reducer.doc
[generic]                  846    1371  61.7% -lh5- 9658 Nov  3  1995 Reducer/Reducer.doc.info
[generic]                 5856    9764  60.0% -lh5- d8de Nov 22  1995 Reducer/reducer.fast
[generic]                  712    1607  44.3% -lh5- cac0 Nov 24  1995 Reducer/Reducer.readme
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         5 files   17610   32490  54.2%            Nov 24  1995