> [...]
> ~ - The 3.5 code was quite different from the 3.1 code (on which
> MegaPov and all community development were based and which was
> pretty old at the time). When 3.5 came out, it required a
> significant investment to port the patches to the new code base and
> most contributors didn't want to spend that time re-doing something
> they had already done just to have to do it again when the next
> version came out (which is one reason why I never ported my
> contributions to the new code base and simply moved to other projects).


Actually the reasons for the MegaPOV development having stopped more or 
less is due to a multitude of reasons - the nature of official POV-Ray 
development after 3.1 is only one of them.  It made continuous 
development of patches more difficult but actually 3.5 and 3.6 both 
greatly simplified managing the project (since both times various 
important changes were integrated or made obsolete by the official 
changes).  Adapting your patches to the changes in the base system for 
example would have been no serious problem but it was not done (i 
considered it several times but always got other priorities in the way).

Here a list of reasons that are from my perspective the most significant 

factors

- change of priorities of several active contributors: Nathan, 
Wlodzimierz and myself.
- lack of interest and participation of both developers and 
non-developers.  We did not receive much feedback on the patches, 
epspecially in the form of active users reporting their experiences and 
contributing sample scenes, tutorials etc.  Note this is not meant to 
sound disappointed - there are multiple reasons for this like the change 

of the software landscape in 3d-CG, the change of mentality in the net 
in general and the focus of the patches that were actively developed.  I 

don't know if licensing actually plays a significant role here but i 
doubt it.
- limitations of the currect internal design of POV-Ray for implementing 

interesting features (this is mostly still the case for 3.7 BTW).
- significant changes in some of the primary computer platforms MegaPOV 
is used on.  This was of course the Apple switch to Intel hardware but 
also the developments on the Windows platform that turned away many 
developers (in the end we had no possibility to build a Windows 
executable with good performance among the core developers any more).

Note much of the actual patch development has been done by individuals 
without much discussion with others - neither private nor public.  This 
has been the case both in the old MegaPOV 0.x as well as afterwards.

-- Christoph

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