Sorry... this will sound like an annoying question, I don't mean it to be.

Approximately how close is 3.7 to being released officially? (not-beta)

Thanks

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"JeffBTX" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Sorry... this will sound like an annoying question, I don't mean it to be.
>
> Approximately how close is 3.7 to being released officially? (not-beta)
>
> Thanks

For years, I use POVRay, the versions are released with a huge delay. I think
POVRay is now mature enough, and does not need releases everyday. For sure, a
3D rendering software is never finished. There is always a lot of things to
optimize, like subsurface scattering, physically-correct rendering, effects...

Even if you don't like the word "beta", I think POVRay 3.7 is now stable and
faster.

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"Rocco" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> "JeffBTX" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > Sorry... this will sound like an annoying question, I don't mean it to be.
> >
> > Approximately how close is 3.7 to being released officially? (not-beta)
> >
> > Thanks
>
> For years, I use POVRay, the versions are released with a huge delay. I think
> POVRay is now mature enough, and does not need releases everyday. For sure, a
> 3D rendering software is never finished. There is always a lot of things to
> optimize, like subsurface scattering, physically-correct rendering, effects...
>
> Even if you don't like the word "beta", I think POVRay 3.7 is now stable and
> faster.

I guess the majority of what's still missing for an official release now is
housekeeping work, such as getting the documentation up-to-date, getting the
installer issues sorted out - stuff like that.

Still a lot of issues, desired features and nice-to-haves open, but the vast
majority of them have been around in 3.6 already, and are unrelated to the
major milestone of getting POV-Ray to make full use of SMP, so I guess they
might just as well be postponed for 3.7.1.

One thing I'd love to see sorted out properly in 3.7 already is gamma handling
though. It's still wanting in many ways, and I don't think it would be prudent
to change it from 3.6 to 3.7.0, and then again already from 3.7.0 to 3.7.1.

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"clipka" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message
news:web.4a555c93c539e5247a70716b0@news.povray.org...
> I guess the majority of what's still missing for an official release now
is
> housekeeping work, such as getting the documentation up-to-date, getting
the
> installer issues sorted out - stuff like that.

Ah .... a perfect opportunitity to pitch the cause of documentation.

Let me summarize where that's at ....

The POV-Wiki and the development wiki have been synchronized as far as the
MediaWiki application itself (v1.15) , however it appears that skin handling
is a moving target at the moment and the custom skin GuMax had some problems
with the update. It's ignoring site style sheet entries. I've resolved those
issues on the dev machine but haven't had time to test and post the changes
to the POV server. In the mean time the default skin is no longer GuMax ...
instead it's monobook. I've done no work on the MediaWiki extension to pull
documentation sets from the Wiki since the content was posted around the
first part of May. Before I stopped I did however manage to get the
framework tied into the MediaWiki application. It takes user input
(platform/format) and bundles a couple of files (text/images) into an
archive that I was able to download and it unbundled just fine. The middle
part is all that's left ..... the translation matrix. I won't be able to
spend much time on that until sometime in October.

What can happen in the mean time is start editing the docs and branding them
v3.7 ..... a couple of you have already had some input (thanks for that) but
there needs to be a bigger push to make this happen.

Have a look at:

http://wiki.povray.org/content/Documentation:Developers_Notes

Chris has all but signed off on this but availability of time has prevented
both of us from moving this any further forward. Certainly how to get this
done is not cast in concrete, but basically that's how I envision it
happening. If there are any takers I will do my very best to set some time
aside to get the adds/deletes/changes flowed back into the "gold" copy of
the documentation.

So here's your chance everyone to pony up and become part of the solution.

Jim

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