This is a list of things I'd like to see in a future version
of POV-Ray. While none of these are massive changes, they are 
all capabilites that I would find useful. Some of these are much
more 'pie in the sky' than others.


1. Overlay textures.
    I'd like the ability of give an 'overlay texture' to a group
    (e.g. union, object, etc) that would work as an additonal layered
    texture above all the constituient objects textures. Useful for
    adding things like dust, grease, moss, that kinda thing, without
    having to go back an add to every object.

2. Faster scene file parsing
    I'm a computer programmer by trade, and I often do scenes that are
    very 'programatic', with lots of 'while' loops, and the like, and
    frankly, the POV-Ray scene parser is really slow. This is really
    obvious with something like POV-Tree, and animations can really 
    be an issue, especially on a relatively slow machine like mine
    (950mhz Athlon). I'm not quite sure what to do to improve things,
    but I would guess that the parser is working with the text directly
    , and not some sort of bytecode, or similar.

3. Implementation of transforms.inc in C
    This kinda ties into #2. I find myself using this file a lot,
    and it would be nice if these functions were implemented natively.

4. Ability to dump a object to a binary format
    This goes with 2. and 3. above. The desire here is to cut to the 
    chase and provide an efficient way to save and load objects. Again, 
    the idea here is to greatly reduce the speed hit for "recursive
    objects". I don't think things like platform or version independence
    are a big deal here, so maybe this wouldn't be too hard to code?

5. Lathe/prism hybrid. 
    It would be super handy to have an object that could be shaped 
    both in the x-z plane and have an 'edge shape'. I'm thinking of an
    implementation like this. First the object is built as a prism,
    then the edge shape is build at each point along the outside, 
    pointing along the surface normal. This would be really useful
    for all sorts of archetectural things, such as moldings, tabletops,
    etc, and I'm sure many organic things as well...

6. Progressive Render
    A lightwave plugin called 'fprime' gave me this idea. Basically a 
    scene is rendered first without things like anti-aliasing, 
    radiosity, photons, etc, and then the renderer uses intelligent 
    algorithmns to determine where those would have an impact, and 
    continually adds those details in. Basically you would allow the 
    render to continue until the desired quality is acheived, at which
    point it would be stopped. This would be handy when dealing with 
    deadlines, as the scene could begin rendering when finished, and
    then improved by the renderer up until the deadline, at which point
    the render as stopped and you take the result.

7. Spline curves
    What I mean by this is taking a 2d curve, as used in a prism, etc,
    and drawing it 'along' a spline. Useful for making troughs, gutters,
    many organic things, etc, especially if a start scale and end 
    scale could be specified.

8. A C(++) API
    This is another way of acheiving some of the above speed-related 
    goals. Allowing creating a pov-scene by linking against the API,
    giving code that builds a binary to render the scene. The ultimate
    for CPU intensive stuff.

9. A larger included texture library
    I'd really like to see some texture includes based on actual
    material properties. Things like the exisiting golds.inc/metals.inc
    are a good start, but more is always a good thing.

10. Better support for 3d Object formats
    I'd love to be able to to use things like Wings3D (or 3DS Max, etc)
    objects in my POV-Scenes directly.
    Maybe using a syntax like:
    extern_object{wings3d "foo.wings"}

Keep in mind these are just the ruminations of a bored POV-User,
and not meant to imply any dissatisfaction with the current state
of the program, just some ideas for future work.

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