> This seems to be an oddly persistent misconception...almost as bad as
> the "4.0 will be GPL" one. POV-Ray does not support plugins because
> there is no platform-independent way of loading them, and the plugins
> themselves would be platform dependent, making for a support nightmare.

Hm, okay. I remember someone saying something along the lines of making it
easier for the Standard-User to make some changes with POV-Ray's way of
doing things, and I immediately thought of plug-ins. Now that you mention
the "charges" against plug-ins, I can see my mistake: I always forget about
the portability problem.

> Because of it being a rewrite, it merits a full version increase. A full
> version number increase does not indicate that it's a rewrite, however,
> only that it's a major update.

I've learned at the university that you begin with 0.x until you've got the
first stable release, that'll be 1.0 then. Patches and updates to that go
along with 1.0.x and 1.x.x. If the main core of the system is exchanged with
a compete rewrite from scratch, that's when 2.x.x comes into play. But it's
a little hazy to remember, was a few years ago. Thorsten posted a link once
which explained the version-number-system POV-Ray uses. Do you have it?

> How does an update to the proximity pattern sound? A blur pattern? Or
> how about an extension to functions which lets you get the surface
> normal and ray direction in pattern functions?

That all sounds really nice. How about a ray which will output the same
color as it would when being rendered? Sort of like an inbuilt camera? If it
shoots rays at the surface where there's supposed to be the camera-pigment
itself, it could just return black, or some other texture (and black is just
default).
But my point was: several enhancements are nice, but I'm only in the
position of making suggestions. I can't code that good myself (yet, perhaps)
and I can't tell anyone what to do on a project like this. I'm grateful for
every little feature which I can use and rely on, but if, for example, the
proximity-pattern wouldn't be implemented in the first release, I wouldn't
blame anyone. Someone would surely cook some method, be it a patch or
SDL-Code, which can do it, although slower than when it had been implemented
right off the start... Or I would go out and code some little SDL myself and
experiment until I got what I needed (as I do these days on things that I
know I'm capable of...).

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>
Email: tim.nikias (@) nolights.de

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