On Sat, 11 Mar 2000 22:42:04 -0500, Chris Huff
<chr### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

>Remember though, that POV-Ray is created by people in their free time. I 
>wouldn't want them to delay the releases so documentation like that 
>could be written. 

I think that the documentation could be improved quite a bit, even
without going into more complex aspects of scene creation. More
illustrations would be a good start.

As for custom-patched versions of POV, every new patch should come
with multiple examples of each new keyword and concept that are
introduced. If the patch is available for Windows, then appropriate
insert-menu addtions should be offered with the patch as well.

>> And it would be nice if POV-Ray had some sort of plugin architecture

>This is a nice idea, but would be nearly impossible to implement.

I'm not a serious programmer, but I've always thought that the main
obstacle to plugins was the attitude of the POV-Team being against
such things. I thought some people had already proposed workable ideas
for implementing plugins, but the POV-Team firmly refused the concept.
Mind you, I don't dare say that it would be easy to add plugins, but I
think it should be possible somehow.

Even POV itself can't be simply compiled on every platform it is used
on, without some porting work performed by talented human programmers.
If this were not the case, then why is there a Mac specialist, a Linux
specialist, a Windows specialist, etc? It took a long time to get a
Linux port of a recent POV version. If POV were perfectly
cross-platform, then there wouldn't have been the wait.

Also, need I remind everyone that the various ports of Official POV
have  different feature sets? The Windows version has a built-in
editor with color-syntax highlighting. I think the Mac version has
QuickTime support. The DOS version has neither.

I think that a plugin system could be devised. Instead of simply
dropping a plugin written for an Intel/Windows machine into a Silicon
Graphics machine running UNIX, one might have to port the plugin the
same way that POV itself is ported. It might even turn out that some
plugins might behave slightly different on different platforms, or
perhaps not be available at all on some platforms. This would be
acceptable to me, as long as everyone realized that plugins were to be
considered *options* and not part of the base functionality of POV
itself. 

I don't hear people saying that 'Photoshop shouldn't use plugins
because not all plugins are available on all platforms'. In fact,
plugins are a vital part of Photoshop's appeal for many people, in
spite of the fact that some plugins aren't available on some
platforms.

Later,
Glen Berry

Post a reply to this message