I have been going through all of the messages on the newsgroup as I 
have just subscribed to them this passed day.  As I look I see many 
different ideas and expansions of POV that need to be made or that 
people would like made.  As I go through I am compiling a list of 
grievances and wants and I am going to post it now and ask that if such 
an option has already been added whether by a patch or by another 
program then please let me know before I expend undue effort on the 
creation of such an option.

    First of all I notice the need for some sort of distributed NetPOV.  
I have many ideas for this and I plan on creating a renderer based on 
the DOS version of POV-Ray that does nothing other than render files 
with no GUI or any other apparent interface.  It will have support for 
multiple frames or for rendering a portion of an image...  Output will 
be to file, network stream, internet stream, or any other means I deem 
necessary and useful.

    Secondly I find a need for a multithreaded version of the Windows 
Executables.  This is so easily done that I almost cry myself to sleep 
at night wondering why it wasn't implemented from the beginning.  There 
will be several options that can be set to determine exactly how many 
threads and how you are going to use those threads...  Options will be a 
-Threads option for declaring a number of threads (more threads would 
even speed rendering on a single processor machine) and specifying 
whether those threads would work on an image or part of an image 
-ThreadPart = 1 -ThreadPart = 2....  That way you could render 
multiple frames at a time or quickly render a single image.

    Thirdly an enhancement to the editor is wanted...  You guys say that 
the editor is not able to be written to?  Well a little bit of 
subclassing of the edit control associated with the editor window might 
do you good.  But that is not my main goal in the editor department.  I 
plan on expanding my DevStudio Add-In to use more of the features of POV 
and I plan on doing my editing from within this environment due to it's 
syntax coloring and advanced help features.  Not to mention 
auto-completion which will be added in DevStudio 98/99 whenever it is 
available such as it works in Visual Basic 5.0 now.

    Fourthly I hear everyone complaining about more features and more 
powerful commands in POV...  Well I plan on expanding POV-Ray to make 
use of all of the lexical conventions of several different languages...  
So look forward to POV-Base, POV-Java, and you better believe there will 
be a POV-CPP.  This comes when I think the language could benefit from 
the use of Classes, Multiple Inheritance and Polymorphism.  And some of 
the newer Ray-Tracers might find the ease of use of Basic to be a 
comfort...  Not to mention with the additon of a couple of Java classes 
Java itself could be extended to do some rudimentary Ray-Tracing from a 
simple POV-Java file.  These lexical modifiers would be in the form of 
plugins and source files would carry different extensions to denote 
their different - .PCPP, .PJAVA, and .PBASIC.  A couple of other 
languages may be accounted for as well.  Depending on how much response 
I get to this posting and what everyone else wants.

    Well guys.  I hope to hear from you all soon.  Reply to the group, 
reply to my email, I look forward to hearing from you all.

-- 
_____________________________________
Justin Rogers, CEO DigiTec Web Consultants
Personal Programmer and Web Consultant
Email:  dig### [at] 3nnet

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