> But beware of developer's hubris, something we've seen a lot in this
groups...

Yeah, I've certainly seen some of that here and there. :)

I'm just speculating out loud what the implications might be if I
do get a scanlining patch working (however minimal at first).
The feature is fairly nontrivial... it's a significant
paradigm change on the entire program, and for a lot of people,
it changes the very nature of POV-Ray. I'm starting to debate
in my mind whether I should take ABX's suggestion and do
a totally different application, even if writing a parser
will be a headache. Maybe a simple app with a simple SDL,
just to demonstrate the idea in isolation at first.

I think hybrid rendering is the future, because you see the technique
being used more and more. Gritz developed Entropy at Exluna and
managed to sell a few copies before Pixar shut him down. The question
I'm perhaps asking is, has the time come for an open source/free
hybrid renderer? And if so, what's the most sensible route to it?
One thing I worry about is people saying "This is really nice,
but why on Earth didn't you make it a POV patch? Now I have
to maintain some scenes in one format and some in another."


> i.e. announcements/proposals from programmers about radical features
> supposed to change the future of Pov-Ray, but that eventually came to
nought
> for various reasons, the main one being that the developers weren't
familiar
> enough with POV-Ray itself and how it is actually used.

I can believe that. For what it's worth, I've given the issue a
lot of thought prior to this thread. I've done several large
projects (Corel Draw for Mac, a PostScript interpreter, a vector
file format, Leveller, and an internal tool for EA I can't
talk about), and I fully appreciate what the logistics are.
I wouldn't do this if I felt I wasn't doing it properly or
was just going to stop halfway through.



> My only advice would be for you to start using POV-Ray yourself to create
> complex scenes and animations (I'm not talking about demo scenes, but
images
> created for the IRTC or another real-life purpose) and then rethink your
> patch from this experience.

It's a good idea, and I'd love to, but I'm afraid I don't have the time.
I did do some map diagram work for a music festival once
with POV-Ray, so I'm not too unfamiliar with it I hope.

Ray

Post a reply to this message