Hello everybody!

(obviously my first attempt to post this on the Povray news server
failed...)

Since almost 20 years, I'm enthusiastic about Afghanistan and its
people. So it's not too strange that since I discovered the potential of

raytracing and 3D animation in the early 90s, I think about re-creating
pre-war Afghanistan as a virtual world, either text-based within the
context of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs), or as a graphical 3D world,
perhaps even real-time navigable (in VRML or so) one day.

Though I never had the chance to travel to real Afghanistan, it
nevertheless hurts to see the country and its unique culture going to
seed completly in years and years of relentless warfare and ignorant
stone-age fundamentalism - with the destruction of Afghanistan's
Buddhist heritage as most recent appalling example.

With the emergence of the Internet, I thought about chances to preserve
old Afghanistan at least in cyberspace (or should we speak of
Khyberspace?), and soon found a convenient tool to take on this task:
the Persistence of Vision Raytracer (or shortly PoV-Ray), a very
powerful freeware raytracing system developed for almost every hardware
platform from Atari ST to BEOS, with countless plug-ins, add-ons,
unofficial modifications, collections of ready-made textures and
objects, graphical user interfaces and, and, and...  downloadable at
http://www.povray.org

As I'm an Afghanistan geek for so many years, I collected much material
about the country, such as current news, travel reports, scientific
works, picture books and even films and music. I also started learning
Afghanistan's lingua franca Dari, a Persian dialect, yet I'm far from
being perfect in this field. Since 1997, I run an own bilingual
(German/English) Afghanistan homepage on the WWW, dealing with current
affairs of the seemingly endless civil war:
http://www.ndh.net/home/bleimann/index.htm

I simply cannot imagine that among 6 billion human beings on this
planet, I was the only raytracing Afghanistan freak... there must be
more people of this kind, maybe Afghans in exile or at least non-Afghans

who visited the country in its more peaceful past and fell in love with
it!

So I look out for same-minded people across the data oceans of the
Internet, who might be interested to join me in the quest to let
1960/70s Afghanistan come to life again... I'm aware that that chance
for this project to ever become a commercially successful enterprise is
next to none, so it is intended as a purely non-commercial project such
as Linux or the above mentioned PoV-Ray, solely relying on the idealism
and enthusiasm of its supporters!

See you in Khyberspace!

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