In article <396### [at] spamlesshotmailcom> , The Ellis Family 
<cel### [at] voyageurca>  wrote:

> #1. Very few people (actually, none that I know of) actually make money
> using PovRay and/or Moray.  In fact, most people seem to prefer to
> *share* their images/source with the rest of the Pov community.

Well, Moray is shareware.  Also, would the IRTC competition CDs used to
finance the povray.org server fall under restrictions of the Lightflow
license.

> #3. Given the huge delay between releases, I think it's safe to say the
> PovTeam is in need of more programmers.

Well, yes, the delays are there.  There are numerous reasons, the fact that
we had to leave CompuServe alone caused a few month delay!

> And, let's face it, the author
> of Lightflow has, in a mere 5 years, single handedly implemented
> features (such as distributed rendering, an accessible api, and *real*
> radiosity)

Well, five years is a long time.  Without knowing the internal structure of
Lightflow I can only say that if you design a program from ground up with
these features in mind it is faster to do than to maintain and add them to a
over ten year old source base written at a time when these features were
more theory than reality.
Also, it is not clear how cross-platform Lightflow is.  It is hard to make
any judgement about the complexity of any program without investigating the
source.
But don't get me wrong, doing such a project alone is a lot of work for
sure.  Additionally keep in mind that the developer of this project either
did not know about POV-Ray or had some reasons not to add the features to
POV-Ray in the first place.  These reasons need to be respected as well!

> that the PovTeam can only dream about (no offence to the
> PovTeam intended; the entire Pov community appreciates their efforts).

No offence taken.

> Don't get me wrong, I like PovRay, but I sense a growing lack of
> interest amongst members of the PovTeam (of coarse, I could be way off
> on this).

You are way off.  It is just a matter of time constraints.  For the Mac
there will be a completely rewritten frontend, for example.
Things like that take long to develop.

> Also, PovRay *needs* an accessible api (I realise that this
> would be difficult to implement in a portable way), and perhaps this api
> could be accessed via Python.

The question is what would you want such an API for?  It is kind of the
nature of POV-Ray to use a scene description language and just to interface
POV-Ray to a modeller you wouldn't need it.  A "small API" like the one
POV-Ray for Windows has is already enough to allow Moray to use it.

> And, most importantly, there needs to be
> more interaction between the PovTeam and the Pov community.  Every 2 or
> 3 weeks, the PovTeam could report on the progress of the next release
> (is this too much to ask?).

It is to much to ask as it would cause much more pressure on the team.  As
it is done in spare time it can happen from time to time that there is no
reportable development for a few weeks.  This may also include the
exploration of new features, reporting anything like that would increase
demand for such a feature, thus increasing pressure.

The TAG is there to improve interaction with the community.

For example it is incredible how many people just send an e-mail to a
bugreport e-mail address or a newsgroup to get help rather than just reading
one paragraph in the manual.  Then there are the real problems with doing
something special in POV-Ray.  For such issues peer support by users is much
more valuable than someone in the POV-Team who perhaps has never even used
the particular feature of POV-Ray trying to help.


Of course it is understandable that users desire a lot more features than
currently available.  It is actually very encouraging to implement those and
continue developing POV-Ray if there are a lot of users asking for new
features.  Some features are easy to add, for other features a lot of
patience is required by users.

You can be sure the POV-Team is aware of the fact that a release every two
years or so requires a lot of patience by our users, and we have and will
surely seek out ways to improve the situation.

This may take some time, so being patient (for a year or so) is probably the
best - any solutions and new ideas need to be worked out in detail, rushing
things now only to show some action in the public won't be a good idea.

For now we have to deal with releasing POV-Ray 3.5.  Once the rewrite
happens with POV-Ray 4.0, POV-Ray will surely again most (if not all) of the
frequently requested features.


      Thorsten


PS: Speaking only for myself!


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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