Corey Woodworth wrote:
>
> 1. Everyone knows pov is slow as molasses. Lets just throw out the old
> deprecated C and convert the whole program to ASM. Everyone has Pentiums now
> anyway.

AHEM! Excuse me, but I happen to have a G3, not a Pentium, thank you.
However, if you like, feel free to download the source code and convert
it all to ASM.

> 2. With the speed afforded to us from improvement number one we can now
> throw out all the old hacks that give us refection and refraction in favor
> for a much better system: Forward ray tracing.

Better how? I think you need to do a little more math here; I seriously
doubt that any speed increase from converting to ASM (even if that were
practical) would offset what you suggest. Besides, POV-Ray still
wouldn't be fast enough; people would use the extra speed to make media
skies and absurdly high radiosity counts and complex isosurfaces and
stuff and still be able to finish rendering them before next month.

> 3. I don't know about you guys but this typing crap is hard.

I dunno, you seem to have managed pretty well to make this post.

> It's the new
> millennium and time for a GUI. Lets mimic a proven formula for productivity
> and intuitiveness.

You also seem to have as poor a grasp of computing history and UI design
as math; scripting has produced a great deal over the years and doesn't
lend itself to more graphical interfaces than the one we already have.

> Bryce!

*falls over laughing*

> 4. I like listening to music when I'm modeling, but it's such a pain to
> alt-tab back and forth between pov and winamp, why don't we make pov a
> winamp plug-in?

Oh. Poor baby. Considered making a playlist? Or hmm, I dunno, buying a
stereo or something that makes sense to the rest of the free world? WTF.

> 5. Speaking of winamp, isn't about time that pov's UI was skinnable?!

You're using Windows, so look into Windowshade (IIRC). There's not much
point in making POV-Ray individually skinnable.

> 6. CSG would be a lot easier if we had more primitives to work with. Cubes
> and spheres were great in preschool but the world is a complex place and we
> need complex shapes to describe it. Here are my suggestions for some new
> primitives: Dodecahedron, Buckyball, Leggo brick, Shreck

Well, having more polyhedra could be useful, though I doubt that they
would find nearly as much use as the existing primitives. They'd
probably end up only being used in their original forms as spaceship
fuel tanks or something.

Of course, you could add a bunch to an include file (if there isn't
already a file like that, which there probably is) and then include the
file in your scenes and use the included shapes as though they were part
of POV-Ray.. which is one reason why include files exist in the first place.

> 7. Its so much fun to return to the pov site after the beta expires to get
> the next one! It makes sure I visit regularly and I have the newest version.
> I think that the final version should expire as well, even if there aren't
> any new versions to download.

"..."

Um.. put the download page in your Favorites and subscribe to it, or
whatever that's called, so that IE will tell you when it changes? Or
really, if you like visiting the POV-Ray site THAT much, just check it
every morning?

(Please tell me you're joking with some of these.)

> 8. While I commend whoever wrote the tutorials, FAQs, and docs that come
> with pov we all know that nobody reads them.

Speak for yourself (and I half-suspect that you are).

> How about we convert them all
> to wav files? If pov becomes a winamp plugin then it would integrate nicely.

Sounds great. You'll pay for my DSL, right? On second thought, just make
it a T1.

-Xplo

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