In article <38C### [at] unforgettablecom>, 
inq### [at] unforgettablecom wrote:

> Either the package should include a comprehensive set of tutorials 
> (particularly on things like isosurfaces, realistic skies and water, 
> media, lighting techniques and complicated crap like that), or it 
> should be provided as a separate download.

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. Maybe a basic manual which describes the features of 
the scene language, and which would be included with and updated for 
each release, and separate tutorials for skies, water, isosurfaces, and 
other "complicated crap", which could be released one by one after the 
main release. :-)


> And it would be nice if POV-Ray had some sort of plugin architecture so
> that if someone wanted to hard-code a tree-generator or fur-generator to
> save parsing time, rendering time, and/or memory, they could do it.
> Patches could use the same architecture, since they would basically work
> the same way (extension to the parser and some custom code to do the
> actual work). It wouldn't prevent you from using #includes, and since no
> casual user is going to be able to figure out how those things work
> anyway, if it's that important to be able to modify the plugins, the
> creators could always provide source code.

This is a nice idea, but would be nearly impossible to implement. An 
include/scene file is the closest thing to that which wouldn't require a 
large amount of effort to do. Remember that the solution would have to 
be cross-platform...a kind of "virtual machine" like Java might work, 
but would probably be a lot of work to write(although it could be much 
faster than ordinary script).

-- 
Chris Huff
e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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