Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:

> Yes, I understand that, but my question (out of sheer curiosity) was
> what, historically, 'POV-Ray 4' was intended to be. I guess it was the
> next future version of POV, but the newsgroup 'pov4.discussion.general',
> over the years, seems to be filled with unrelated topics. So, I wondered
> how povr and hgpovray38 relate to that mythical pov4? Are they
> intermediary steps or are they the intended as the 'real thing'? Just
> idle questions from a guy who has nothing better to do ;-)

Well, unless someone can provide a clear and unambiguous historical answer, I'd
say that whatever the intention was, it's lost to history.

I'd say that probably what we're looking for gets broken down into speed,
reliability, and functionality.

So, then we make ourselves an outline, and start making entries under those
headings.

1. What can be made faster / what really NEEDS (realistically) to be faster?
2. What are the parts of POV-Ray that are unstable/unreliable?
3. And functionality -
which I think can be broken down into 3 parts
  A. programming / math - because as much as POV-Ray is a renderer,
     it primarily relies on SDL code to generate the content
     So, data types/containers, algorithms, mathematical functions

  B. scene assembly / modeling
     this can be split up into geometry and texturing,
     and of course we have other things like camera, lighting, etc
     ...and the parser.

  C. rendering
     Likely much of this will be things like ray-object intersections
     and related things that Bill Pokorny is up to his eyeballs in


clipka had some things to say about some of this here:

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C49ca3d4e%241%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=305193&moff=10

So maybe one single thread can be set aside to post nothing but the barest
descriptive entries, with a meta-thread dedicated to commentary and discussion.
The we can see where we're at, and where it would be productive for people to go
and do.

Plus, it would provide an easy list to refer to when sifting through the forums
for code that already accomplishes (mostly) what is on the wish list.

Because 4.0 was supposed to be a break from the slow bureaucratic suicide of
backwards-compatibility - so since we're the only ones using POV-Ray, and HERE,
guess who decides what 4.0, if it's ever going to get made, will be?

Post a reply to this message