Hi,

I used POV-Ray 3.6.2 as a "photorealistic" renderer for Lexolights, our
OpenGL/OpenSceneGraph-based scene viewer (lexolight.sf.net).



Now, I started to test POV-Ray 3.7 RC3. I found some issues that I want to share
before final 3.7 release.



1. HOME variable is not updated in the registry
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\POV-Ray\CurrentVersion\Windows\Home
   is not updated in the registry after installing 3.7 RC3 and the path
   is still set to the old 3.6.2 installation.

   Updating the HOME will be useful to make applications to find
   the new version.

2. should "Programs" be included in
C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Programs\POV-Ray\3.7 ?
   All other applications are in [company]\[appName] dir. I know, there is no
company with POV-Ray.

3. Command-line options limitations:

- I can not render an image on background without showing POV-Ray GUI. This is
perfectly possible with Linux POV-Ray, but not on Windows.

- "/RENDER povFile" is nice, but I can not pass image dimensions, iniFile or
other cmd-line settings to POV-Ray as pvengine wants just one argument of model
name.

- "/EXIT povFile iniFile" is good as iniFile can carry the image dimensions and
other options. However, there are two problems:
(a) there is no way to disable GUI (minor issue)
(b) if the user is running its own instance of POV-Ray, nobody can schedule
/EXIT because it fails with the message that only one instance of POV-Ray is
allowed. Thus, there is no way to render images "on background" once there is
running instance of POV-Ray.

- "/EXIT /NORESTORE povFile iniFile" is nice as it saves the time of loading
unnecessary files if doing "background" rendering. However, empty instance is
saved on the exit and next time, the user starts his session, he gets empty
session.

4. I did not succeed to parse rendering progress on stdout/stderr. If there is a
way, please give me a hint.


If I am missing something, please, point me to a good way. Otherwise, I would be
very happy for any improvement on these limitations.

Thanks. POV-Ray is cool!
John

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