On Fri, 21 Aug 1998 04:30:21 +0300, "Peter Popov"
<pet### [at] usanet> wrote:

>Ah, so there're macros and arrays in one place? Cool. Is there an url where
>Win95 binaries available anywhere or can you post them in p.b.programming or
>even e-mail them to me? Source would be fine, too, especially if you've
>changed the Win95 version. 

Well, actually, um, the arrays haven't been put in yet either.  Here's
a list of what's in there now:

- isosurfaces
- rational bezier patches
- sphere sweeps
- object bounds (see http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html)
- built-in spline calculator

If I did add arrays, it'd probably be along the lines of what's in
TMPOV rather than what's in POV 3.1.  Adding slope-dependent textures
wouldn't be too difficult, either.  I used to have a system for adding
patches, but I lost my old machine when I changed jobs and only just
got a Pentium-class machine again.  Even I'm not enough of a masochist
to try building POV on a 486.

>Curious again, what do you mean by "plugin functionality"? Do you mean to
>develop a "hey-look-what-great-texture-this-dll-can-make" kind of api? If
>so, cool!

That, among other things.  My goal is to provide an interface so you
can make a DLL with a new type of object, new warp, new camera, new
texture, new bitmap i/o support routines (jpg, tiff, whatever), new
functionality for existing objects (procedural heightfields, meshes
with an "insideness" function), new functions (object bounds,
primitive collision detection, color_at, normal_at).  Basically, about
85% of what people patch POV to do. (The other 15% is massive patches
like my motion blur patch, DSW's dispersion patch, or the PVMPOV patch
that affect everything fundamentally.)

Of course, unless this whole thing is cross-platform capable, it'll be
useless, so I hope to enlist support from the Linux, Amiga, Mac, and
other users out there in making it work with shared libraries on those
systems as well, as much as practical.  DOS doesn't do shared
libraries, but I want it to be easy for DOS users to statically link
with as many plugins as they want without having to merge things like
I did for the superpatch.

Will it ever be distributed?  I don't know.  The new POVLEGAL leaves
that somewhat in doubt, due to the clause forbidding the creation of
new interfaces to external code.  The POV-Team has tossed the ball
around on this one, and right now it looks like portability will be a
major sticking point, but they've promised me they'll return to the
issue after 3.1 is released and come up with a definitive ruling on
it.  In the meantime, I'm trying to find the time to throw together a
working model in 3.0 to show that it really can be done and can be
cross-platform.

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