Well, Christoph seems to be a little upset, and I hope
we can agree that perhaps the topic itself, "feature
requests", is a little touchy...

First of all, POV is a magnificient program, and its
development (some call it "slow", I'd rather say
"thorough") doesn't hinder me.

Taking just its SDL, you can code a lot of stuff,
e.g. that depth-thing could be easily done by putting
a proper texture on all objects, or using plain white
as texture and some black fog...

Then, never forget that POV is FREEWARE, and that
no one gets paid to do their job. If guys like you and
me don't get enough time to work on an image for
about an hour a day, how can we expect to have people
move entire programs around in their brain to get something
working in an hour? I think, POV requires more time, just
because the actual programers have less than paid
ones (they've got another RL).

And, once POV is released, it runs pretty stable. Okay, this
new POV 3.5 seems to still have some rare bugs, but which
program doesn't? Every program with a good company behind
it gets a patch/update a few weeks after release. Beta-Testing
was pretty thorough, but still, not too many had the
patience to actually work on them (me included, I did use
the beta's, but didn't have the time to actually sit there and
track bugs, though I would have liked to contribute).

So, plainly put: it's a good idea to metion ideas, but it
is a bad one to start whining why this isn't done, or why
that isn't implemented... In my experience, the POV-Team
had good reasons for leaving this out, and putting something
else in, and I trust their expertise on this program.

And finally, if you need something implemented that badly,
do it! You can download the source, just go ahead!
I'm no pragrammer (yet), so I'm at the hands of the Team,
but I still like what they've done so far, and I can't wait
for further improvements. Nontheless, all good things require
time and patience. Things done in haste mostly are just waste.

I hope this prevents a perhaps too hot-headed debate about
why-not and that's-why. I like to keep things calm and steady.

Regards,
Tim


--
Tim Nikias
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights/index.html
Email: Tim### [at] gmxde

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