On Mon, 14 Sep 1998 19:04:27 -0500, Dan Connelly <djc### [at] flashnet> wrote:
>Laszlo Vecsey wrote:
>> 
>> Ooops, I spoke too soon. Here is the answer for those wondering:
>> 
>>         http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html
>> 
>> Now does anyone know if something like this will be included in future
>> versions of povray?

I wrote it, and I haven't submitted it for consideration by the POV Team, so I 
would say offhand that they have no idea that it even exists.  But even if 
they had such an idea, it has enough bugs that I wouldn't bet much on its 
chances to be included.  In particular, it relies on auto-bounding, so objects
that are not auto-bounded probably cause hard-to-find errors.

>This is a good question.  http://www.twysted.net/PatchStation/ is
>full of quite useful patches -- angle-dependent reflection,
>spherical sweeps, slope-dependent textures, blurred reflections,
>bounding boxes, text justification, isofunction objects, uv mapping....

Many of which have been added to what I like to call the "superpatch," along
with some other patches that haven't been released anywhere yet (for examples
of what you can do with my new crackle textures, see 
http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/crackle.html).  Keep your eyes open for the 
superpatch; I have about three or four more things I want to add, and I've 
recently gotten some help with the documentation, so I hope to have it out 
sometime soon.  I also hope it won't be too hard to apply to the 3.1 source 
when it is released.

>Clearly, though, the POV team takes a conservative approach in
>including these things in the core code.  And with good reason --
>it's very easy to whip together a patch and test it on a few
>simple cases.  But new features must be supported, which adds
>substantially to the burden.  

True.  I posted at length recently on this topic, but other reasons why 
patches don't get included are: (1) The POV Team doesn't know about them. 
(2) The authors haven't given the Team permission to use them. (3) They 
aren't high enough quality or general-purpose enough to include.  See my 
earlier posting for some quotes from Chris Young, POV Team coordinator, 
on this matter.

>So I wouldn't get too hopeful.  I just wish, though, they would
>back off on the povlegal.doc to allow the innovation which
>so enriched the selection of 3.0 options to continue with
>3.1 .  The current document basically makes all patches
>impractical to implement legally.  All that remains is the
>independent development of GUI extensions.

Not true at all, and if I contributed to that impression, I apologize.  The
current POVLegal adds only one new restriction to development, and for very
good reason.  That restriction is that you can't develop new _interfaces_ to
POV.  That shoots down some development projects that might be helpful to
the POV community at large, such as my plugin proposal, but it doesn't affect
anything else that I know about.  And I'm still free to develop plugins; I
just can't distribute them without getting them into the official version.
At least that's how I read the rules.  And this is far from a dead issue; 
Chris Young has promised me that the POV Team will revive the plugin debate 
after 3.1 is on the shelves.  (In return, I've promised him not to rouse 
the rabble about plugins, so keep those cards and letters, folks!)

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