On 1/10/2025 02:04, yesbird wrote:
> Dear friends-povers !
> 
> All of us know that our lovely oldest but goldest ray tracer has
> great potential, but unfortunately not much popular among the modern
> community for a couple of reasons: complicated SDL, lack of dedicated
> editor (but Blender can export), not enough information in media, etc.
> 
> Bill works hard to improve this situation, but the skills and time of
> one man is not enough for such complicated and time consuming stuff. I
> would like to assist him all ways I can and have a following proposal.
> 
> Having conversion service for all popular graphics formats
> (https://povlab.yesbird.online/all2pov/) now we can try to attract
> people from most active CG communities, at least:
> https://www.zbrushcentral.com/
> https://www.artstation.com/
> https://blenderartists.org/
> https://polycount.com/
> 
> I am already registered in many of them, and can try to make some
> advertising to to POV-Ray there. The main problem I see here is a
> lack of modern and convenient communication channel - newsgroups are
> outdated and people don't want to take a step (or more) back.
> Realtime chats, fast graphics and video exchange is very important when
> discussing technical graphics details, so if we need to move forward,
> appropriate service is a must have.
> 
> You will laugh, but I guess that Discord channel will be the best
> solution as it is very popular among CG and gaming society, easy to use
> and satisfies all our needs. We can use it not instead, but as addition
> to our present newsgroups publishing best images, technical hints, and
> answering questions.
> 
> What do you think about all of the above ?
> Let's make POV-Ray great again ! (Or, maybe, not ?)

I have a list of things I want to add to POV once we get 3.8 out of the way (I need
someone to do that as I can't, at least not right now). Most of the things in my list
touch exactly on the topic of getting more traction. Primarily, the way I see we could
get most traction is by having not just the full POV-Ray in releases (i.e. what we
have now), but also a libPOV - i.e. POV-Ray as a library, without a parser,
specifically intended to be integrated with third-party applications.

This will provide the means for platform-independent raytracing (whether intending to
really raytrace or just to create simple graphics) in applications via a
carefully-defined API implemented in a few officially-supported major languages (at
least C++, C# / dotnet and Python - the latter is critical). The API would allow
direct creation of objects without using SDL, plus permit calling existing functions
such as trace etc. It would also allow for animations to avoid having to re-parse the
entire source when only moving the camera (or a few objects as long as bounding is
re-calculated).

Apart from making it easy to add sophisticated graphic generation to just about
anything, from a simple python script up to a huge C++ application (a good example
would be rendering circuit boards in PCB editors).

Additionally it would make it much easier for existing 3D tools to add POV-Ray support
since rather than having to generate SDL they can call our API directly.

I have a few libraries that I have squirreled away somewhere that would add value,
such as generic object import; I'll have to dig them out and list them here.

As for engagement in terms of talking / forums - I have a dislike of walled gardens
like Discord as the knowledge shared there is locked away from search and thus does
not benefit the general public. I would consider endorsing one provided we have a path
to extract the chats / threads into a form we can have on our website, thus allowing
it to be indexed via search engines.

As for our forums themselves - the entire forum system here on news.povray.org needs
replacing with a much more modern alternative. I have a (commercial, but affordable)
candidate I would like to use, but the one thing that is bugging me is it would
require dropping support for NNTP (unless I want to write a plugin for it, which I
don't). If we went this way basically the current forums would be made available on
the new site as a read-only copy of what's here now, separate from the live forums.
There's a bunch of issues with moving to a new forum (like, do we make the effort to
match user accounts with the archived posts) but overall I consider it essential in
the long term.

I'm interested in hearing from existing NNTP users as to whether the move to a
web-based forum will be an impediment to you.

Finally: all the above is a bit of a brain-dump that I came up with in the period of a
few minutes; a much more detailed reply would take me hours as I would need to look at
all my notes and saved links accumulated over the last few years. Hence some of what I
said here may be not quite right, but the overall meaning is, I hope, understood.

-- Chris

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