William Tracy <wtr### [at] calpolyedu> wrote:

> PovClipse *does* look nice.
Thanks a lot ;-))

> My only concern is how friendly it is going
> to be for new users.

True, Eclipse has quite a bit to learn about, but it offers a great platform
in turn.

> Speaking as someone who has never written Eclipse plugins, how hard
> would it to be to detangle it from Eclipse and have it run stand-alone?
> Having the entire Eclipse SDK is kind of overkill. :-)

That's the lovely thing, you do not need the full-blown Eclipse platform at
all! The minimal thing you need is the Eclipse "Platform Runtime Binary"
edition. It's extremely easy to build a complete custom application using
the Eclipse platform and developed plug-ins. In fact this is what many
companies are doing right now: moving from their own self-written
application to the Eclipse platform, probably re-writing much of their
code.
This way it's still in the hand of the development team which Eclipse
version they support, there can be even complete OS-dependent installer for
the GIU application if necessary.
The plugin itself can not be deattached completely from Eclipse, they are
ways to much interweaved. The plugin is written *for* Eclipse, not *with*.

BTW, I would suggest splitting the renderer from the GUI application
completely, like mentioned by nemesis above. The one wanting to be a
"hardcore-hacker" can still use their vim, emacs or what-so-ever editor,
but and the one wanting support by a specialized, feature-rich editor
should be supported by a GUI application like PovClipse or QtPovEditor.

> Also, how hard would it be to make it not require the user to set up and
> organize projects? The project concept is useful when you're developing
> large pieces of software, and could be nice for managing scenes that
> have lots and lots of include files. For most users just getting
> started, though, I see it becoming just one more stumbling block. :-( It
> would be nice to be able to just open up a .pov file and press "render".

The project thing is extremely easy to understand and to use. You need just
a couple of clicks to set-up your project in the default manner.
There is also a tutorial describing it.
IMHO the new users should be "trained" to utilize well-proved design
patterns like projects. In fact this was a thing I always missed in the
actual POV version: structuring your scene code and preserving it. Yes, you
can do it yourself by putting everything in a folder and ZIP that, but there
is nothing appealing to you to do so.

- Wolf

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