clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> You just can't expect to forever have access to the latest and greatest
> new POV-Ray features on the oldest and coldest operating systems.
>
>
> So what's the solution to continue to use those old tools? Well, use a
> matching POV-Ray version, obviously. One from those olden golden days.
>
> That, or indeed run those tools under DOS-Box. I'm not sure how that
> emulator works, but it surely will have ways to export and import files
> from it, right?

So, just thinking out loud:

This whole legacy workflow / tool-chain that he's got going as an example of why
it would be nice to have a growing collection of analogous in-house tools to
perform the scene-building part of the workflow, instead of parting-it-out to
whatever third-party external software things might be available.

I remember Sam Benge posted a very nice pile of rocks/grains that he made using
a dataset generated with Voro++.  It would be nice to have the crackle pattern
points and knobs exposed to the SDL so we had something like that - since making
piles of rocks is something people invariably try to do in POV-Ray.

Chris Cason was generous enough to purchase the rights to Moray so that someday
we can have a GUI modeler for the things that modelers are good for.  And a
modeler like Moray is irrefutably desireable and (in)directly used in
raytracing.

I know that the current paradigm is that "POV-Ray is a raytracer", but creating
the things that will be raytraced by POV-Ray I think is an integral part of the
POV-Ray experience.  And the more "pieces" we own in our own little toolbox, the
less will be lost to changes in OS's, 3rd-party blackbox software, licensing
changes, and other links in the scene-creation chain.

I know that I have suggested a few things in the past that at first glance
"don't have much relation to raytracing", but I do hold firm in my opinion that
they would be valuable scene-creation and modification tools. There are many
people who are, or were, enthusiastic POV-Ray enthusiasts, and would likely be
happy to donate/license the use of their already-written code for various
algorithms to use in future distributions.

Some might even be winding down their careers in computer science and related
fields, and would find contributing new features to the POV-Ray codebase an
enjoyable and rewarding activity.

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