Hi all,

    I've had some thoughts recently on ways to improve (IMHO) POV-Ray and I
was wondering what others think. I realize that not all of these ideas are
original and I'm not trying to take credit for them all. Also I feel that
POV-Ray is a great program as is and I'm not trying to criticize it, I just
think it could be made even better.

1.    Pre-parsing / POV Binary format: I think it would be very, very useful
if POV-Ray supported some sort of compiled binary format for scene files and
that this format was well defined and documented. There are a number of
benefits this could give which will be discussed below.

2.    Object orientedness: I've often felt that POV-Ray is screaming to make
its scene language more object oriented. I think something like the
following would be very useful (this is not 100% thoughtout yet):

        mySphere = new sphere( <0,0,0>, 1.5 );
        mySphere.Texture = myTexture;
        myNewSphere = mySphere;
        mySphere.Scale = x*2;
        myNewSphere.Scale = y*2;
        while( intersects( mySphere, myNewSphere ) ) {
            mySphere.x += 0.01;
        }

    Further, I think that if idea 1 (POV Binary format) was implemented than
this OO idea is not necessarily work that the POV-Ray team needs to do. If
someone else created a new POV scene language that correctly compiled into
the binary format then that would give a lot of flexibility.
    Although, in theory, someone could write a new scene language parser now
that generates normal POV scene language I think this idea would be a lot
cleaner and easier in the long term.

3.    Simplified Render Engine: If the above ideas were implemented then I
think the POV render engine could/should be simplified a bit. It would only
need to read/parse the binary format and then produce the output file. I
think that it should also have some abilities to interact with other process
to give real-time statistics information or whatever.

4.    On a different track, I'd also really like to see POV-Ray have the
ability to reflect light. I know this is a difficult and time consuming
calculation but it's something I've wished for for a long time.


    I think that one of the real short comings of POV-Ray right now is how
difficult it is to "know" about an object created in a scene, especially for
object interactions. At the same time I don't think the ability to do this
should be forced into the render engine. Given a clean, well defined render
engine then any outside idea could be implemented.


    Thoughts, comments?


--Rainer

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