> > Is it just me, or does POV seem to be turning more and more into a
> > programmers toy...
> 
> Well, there have been some very hot (or chilling) threads a few months
> (years) ago where a few programmer-type users described their ideal POV
> scripting. It was nothing like anyone sane would consider :-)

I think I saw some of them - some maniac suggesting XML as a scripting 
language was one of them, wasn't it?
 
> More seriously, I don't think that the nature of the Povray script has
> changed that much. After all, the original isosurface patch was created for
> Povray 2.2, and loops and other programmins structure were available in 3.0.
> Even in the days of Povray 1.0 people developed simple utilities like
> Connect-the-dots or Suds (remember this one ?) to enhance the fun.

Nope, sorry, I started with 2.2, and have never seen CTD or Suds (BTW, 
what is/was Suds?) although I've seen plenty of references to CTD in 
various places.

> What has changed is us : we've become much more demanding in terms of quality
> and realism, and this in turn calls for more complexity, which can be
> obtained either by programming or by using modelers.

I don't deny that, it's just that as time has gone on, more and more of 
what I consider to be programming features have been implemented, such as 
loops, conditional if statements, file i/o, and suchlike.  I don't deny 
that they're useful in the right hands, it's just that to me they're 
utterly useless, as I have no programming inclination (or possibly 
talent) and thus will never use them.

The SDL raytracer in the docs is an example of how in some ways POV can 
start to look less like what I have been using for the past 8 years and 
more like a C compiler which got lost along the way :)

> Actually, I believe that the biggest jump for Povray in 3.5 is the mesh2
> format with uv mapping support, allied with radiosity, because it opens the
> way to the use of Povray as an inexpensive, popular rendering engine for big
> apps. A couple of days ago, someone (mistakenly) posted a Povray export
> plug-in for Maya in the beta-test group and I find this little event quite
> significant.

It very possibly is.

Bye for now,
     Jamie.

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