Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:

> > Shay <Sha### [at] cccc> wrote:
> >> Best example I've seen yet, and a very compelling, but I'm not sold.
> >
> >   Ok, clearly there's no way to convince you, so we can stop trying.
> > You have expressed your opinion at it has become clear. Case closed.
>
> The goal of this discussion, IMO, is not to convince someone that
> someone else is right, it's to draw a picture of what can be ahead,
> including the pros and the cons of any proposal.
>
> His worries are perfectly licit and likely represent those of many
> people.  This should be adressed with enough distanciation.
>
> Fabien.

I don't really see that this kind of support is a key point in POV 4, but I
also don't see how it could be a bad thing. I suspect the people spending
time implementing these libraries in SDL' aren't going to be the same
people writing the core code, or rather they don't have to be.

On the mesh issue, render-time subdivision would be interesting, although
for me textures usually seem to outweigh meshes in storage requirements,
and (again for me) minimising render time is more important than memory
use. Render-time subdivision is nice for the first use case, and I would
hope it wouldn't adversely affect the other. I can't see myself making much
use of more general mesh manipulation capabilities in POV, but I can't see
the negative impact, really. From the description it sounds like they would
be a "there-if-you-need-them" feature.

Other things I wanted to mention:

* There seems to be a lot more talk about the future SDL than any future
rendering capabilities.

* Specifically on programmable shaders, how will we maintain backwards
compatibility to the somewhat bitty and odd features like irid? Built-in
shader "library"?

* Probably been mentioned before, but I can't remember; will POV 4.0
incorporate any code at all from 3.7, or will it be a complete rewrite?

* I love media {}. Most of the jobs it fails at are actually jobs for an
improved shading language, in my view. For many things it's excellent, even
compared to some professional applications, unusually.

Tom

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