On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 19:22:00 -0000, Matthew Bennett 
	<ben### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:
>Grr...  I know this have been brought up before, but why can't POV accept
>dlls to add new features to it, like Moray? Yes, I know they're platform
>specific - but it would be great if this ability could be added even just to
>the Windows version.  Yeah, sure - I suppose they'd be quite a technical
>problems (like what sort of procedures would be required in the first place
>to write the dlls) but I can only hope ;)

I considered doing this at one point, and I even sent a (rough) 
proposal to the POV Team about it, since doing anything with it 
would require a variance to POVLEGAL.  Last I heard, they were 
going to revisit it after 3.1 was out the door.  Obviously 3.1 
has shipped, but since I don't have time to actually do the project 
right now anyway, I haven't bothered trying to shepherd the proposal 
back onto their schedules.  The cross-platform stuff isn't as bad 
as it looks - most modern operating systems support dynamic linking 
in one form or another, and the rest (i.e. DOS) would still benefit 
from the greater organization inherent in the plugin model.  Still, 
Chris Young has indicated that dynamic loading is not something the 
Team wants to think about, as evidenced by the likely removal of 
"function library" support from the isosurface patch if and when it
is made official.

You should know, though, that a lot of the less simple patches,
including the UV mapping patch, would be difficult to fit into
any kind of simple plugin model anyway.

>From someone that prefers to only use the official POV binaries, it's
>annoying to see so many great ideas/features only available from
>"home-built" patched versions. :(

Chris Young has said that they're seriously looking at all of the 
available patches with an eye toward including some of them in 
version 3.5. We'll all just have to sit back and see what happens.

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