My opinion could sway to either side of this debate.
I once tried changing 'phong' and 'phong_size' to "gloss" and
"gloss_used" just for aesthetics, to use a more household word instead.
I went so far as to convert a few scene files so the name changes could
be recognized and made a few more new scenes too. BTW, I had to also
change my _surface.inc (customized finish.inc) and several other
includes to work with this custom pvengine.exe.
It wasn't long before I switched back due to the incompatiblity with so
many files, old or new. I still have custom includes I use for
everything from colors (_color.inc) to woods.inc (_wood.inc) which in
itself is not too compatible outside of my own environment here. Sure,
all the original stuff is still in them, but if I get an outside source
that requires the colors.inc, textures.inc, etc., I have to change those
filenames or leave copies of the originals around.
As you can see the ability to customize so many aspects can get garbled
in the translation. Even though I've heard mention before of
customizable keywords (which I found, during all that, keywords can't be
re-defined using #declare to solve the custom keyword problem) it
obviously gets chaotic enough just adding new includes that have to be
passed around to ensure renderability (don't we all know it!).
Guess that kind of goes with the territory though, which is why I said I
could see it both ways, but not easily. All in all, the argument for,
rather than against, plug-ins as stated by others seems a valid point.


"povray.org admin team" wrote:
> 
> just imagine what it would be like if we started to
> have scene files floating around that depended on a particular mod being
> loaded. it'd fragment POV's standard, work-on-any-platform scene language
> into a bunch of platform-specific dialects.

-- 
 omniVERSE: beyond the universe
  http://members.aol.com/inversez/POVring.htm
=Bob

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