In article <8F6263A94lavendersmith@204.213.191.228> , 
lav### [at] hotmailcom (lavender) wrote:

> Grand I finally provoke a hidden pov team member to finially come out in to
> the light and talk to me. I have tried to get this for a while now.

You don't have to be rude to accomplish this!

> One: Why are you programming POVRAY? My hope answer: To produce the best and
> most capable program to your abilities. Why my stance: The limits you have
> placed on povray show you amount of pride in your work. If a process is
> available you should not count it out just because you do not want to put your
> time into your creation.

> You should try harder to do what you have set out to
> do. I complaine about the pov team backing off of their commitment to all of
> us that use the very program the team created.

We make POV-Ray for fun.  The POV-team shares a common interest (in simple
terms: writing a raytracer) and we make it available to anyone for free, we
have a commitment only to ourselves, it has never (as far as I know) been
stated that we make POV-Ray only for our users.  We make it because we like
to use it, and we then share it with you.  We could also charge money for
this sharing, not make the source code available or just stop distributing
it.

To make this one point clear: The POV-team owns POV-Ray, we have the
copyright for the source code.  If we don't like to implement something or
we do not have the resources (programmers, time, etc) we won't.  It is our
software and we do with it what _we_ like, not what _you_ like.
We enjoy adding features to POV-Ray because we like to have a powerful tool
to play with, and this is usually an interest we share with the other users
of POV-Ray.  We also listen do ideas from other users, not because we have
to, but because we also like the features they suggest.

> It is called integraty. If I
> say I will do something I must do it. If I only go half way I lack integraty.

We never said we will do something.  The only thing we ever stated are plans
we have, plans of features we would also like.  We did not say there will be
a POV-Ray X.Y next year, it will have feature A, B, C.  And we do it for a
good reason: People like you who seem to forget that we don't have all the
resources of the world, or the resources you think we have to have, are the
problem.  And people like you who forget that we provide this for free, do
the work in our spare time we could also spend with our girlfriends, wives
or children.

> You claim how difficult it is to do what I have sudjested but I have done just
> what I have asked with clumsey and slow code. It does not dive directly into
> the pov code but uses Povray as an engine. That tells me that it is not that
> difficult to do.

It tells me that you don't know what you are talking about.

You wrote a program that distributes a scene or sequence of frames over more
than one computer, fine, that is indeed not difficult oif all are using the
same operating system.  You use operating specific functions to connect to
the other systems, fine.  What did these functions do?  Did you use OLE over
the network?  In what format did you transfer the commands?  Did you specify
a path to a directory/file available to all computers in the network to
access the scene file?  Or did you transfer it to each computer?  How well
did your distribution system scale on larger/smaller networks of computers?
How much network bandwith did it consume?  How does it recover when error
occure on one/many/all computers?  What happens if not all computers provide
the same render speed?  Do you wait for the slowest computer al the time?
What if one computer crashes, do you wait forever?  How easy is it to setup
the rendering on multiple systems?  Does everybody need to have full access
to all systems, do you have to start it on very system manually? Does it
handle access control? How are systems connect, over an Ethernet, over the
Internet using a modem connection?

These are just some issues that exist when running on only one operating
system.  It get more complicated on multiple systems: What network protocol
do you use to support most operating systems?  TCP/IP, fine, and now?  What
format do you transfer files?  Do they all get DOS/Unix/Macintosh style line
endings?  What about include files?  Are the stored locally?  On a server?
What happens to path specifications?  Some operating systems use a colon,
some a slash and some a backslash, and some use yet another separator. How
to you translate these, how to you interprete a DOS path on a Unix system?
Is it any use to specify an absolute path at all?  Probably not, how could
it work then?  How do you get the results back to the system that started
the render?  Again, you need to define, develop and iterate a protocol for
this.  And do you let everybody render their stuff on your computer? No, you
need access control again!  How do you provide this in a cross-platform
manner?  How do you abstract a network API for easy cross-platform porting
of POV-Ray?  If you send raw data over the network, how do you handle
endianess?  Decide for big or little endian?  Pick any, yes?  No! The
conversion takes time on the system using the opposite endianess.  Is it
much time? No, but it will hit performance.  How do you specify the
computers you want to render on?  A text file?  What about GUI integration?
And what on a command line?

All this needs to be researched and developed first, not even to mention
issues like radiosity.  Do you still think it is soooooo easy?

> Secondly men where able to send a person to the moon useing a slide rule so
> any rebuff from the pov team about what can and can not be done is a result of
> their direct willingness to apply the energy required.

And US$10000000000 ???  (In American English this would be "ten billion".)

> One of these post stated that there is no other program that uses network
> rendering over multiple platforms. I would send them to the Newtek site.

Wrong!  To quote myself:
"How many of the "professional" programs can do this on more than just a few
Unix platforms?  The answers is simple: None.  Pixar added Windows NT
support for RenderMan just a short time ago"

> Lightwave has been doing this for a very long time. And yes they have
> radiosity also. They are driven by money. The pov team should be driven by
> pride. This is a great accomplishment they have in creating a program such as
> povray with no direct finatial input and limited time. To fall short now is
> like an athlete training hard and winning some local meets and then going to
> the olipics just to set in the stands.

Lightwave 3D information on that website:

>>
Windows NT
Pentium 266 or better
Windows NT v. 4
64MB RAM Minimum

Alpha Windows NT v.3.51 or later
64MB RAM Minimum

Silicon Graphics Inc. systems IRIX 6.2 or later
64MB RAM Minimum

PowerMac Systems PowerPC CPU
System 8.6 or later
64 MB RAM Minimum

All systems require 15MB hard drive space, CD-ROM for installation, and a
minimum screen resolution of 800 x 600.
The minimum RAM is really the Minimum -- trust us, you'll want more.
<<

To add a few things here:  Alpha Windows NT is no longer developed by
Microsoft.  And 64 MB of RAM as minimum, well, POV-Ray will run on Windows
9x, NT/2000, Mac OS 7.55 and later, IRIX, Sun OS, BeOS, Linux, etc, etc with
just about 5 MB of free RAM minimum.

So, well yes, it runs on "multiple platforms", and how many?

Oh, and because it is such a great free product you have to decide to donate
US$2500 the the developers?  Also this does add to this point, it adds to
your other insults.

> The Pov team has the knowlage and the ability to make Povray the most
> powerfull program available. They just need to be pushed like an athalete to
> perform at the level we all know they can reach.

In case you haven't figured it out yet:  WE DO NOT LIKE TO BE PUSHED!!!


     Thorsten


Speaking for myself.

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