On Sun, 1 Nov 1998 10:02:00 +0100, "Alessandro Coppo" <a.c### [at] iolit>
wrote:

>I cannot complain about POV (I have not payed for it and, notwithstanding
>what says Richard Stallman, if you do not pay for something, you have no
>right about it... but to fix it by yourself) but unfortunately POV Team is
>growing more and more anti-Windows. 

This is an interesting statement, coming from someone who actually has
POV-Ray 3.1 available for his platform.  I'm sure some Unix
afficionados here would have a slightly different perception of it, if
they bothered to read this group.  Maybe they're all over in
povray.unix... nope, only Windows has its own group.  Must be an
anti-Windows thing.

>Who knows, may be we might start
>studying OpenGL and DirectX and getting knowledgeable about
>Microsoft/SiliconGraphics Fahrenheit project... 

As has been stated many, many times before, OpenGL and DirectX are
practically useless for raytracing.  Previewing, maybe, but that is
the domain of a modeler.  Though a nice GPL modeler would be great...

>as Bryce demonstrates, a few
>compentent and determined people can write a great rendering tool. You just
>have be able to parse POV scripts.

Bryce was written by a lot of competent and determined people who were
getting a steady paycheck from Metatools (or whatever they were called
when Bryce was written).  Still, a free POV-alike is something that
has been suggested by a lot of people.  Somehow, everyone who has said
that they'd like to write their own free version of POV has never had
anything to show for it.  I'm not against the idea, so if you've got
the time and the knowhow, feel free to jump right in and get it
started.  A good place to start might be
http://www.gnu.org/software/panorama/panorama.html .  I hear they're
looking for someone to write a POV parser.  Your first task, though,
is likely to be porting their code to work on the Windows platform.

That's the nice thing about that new rule in POVLEGAL.  Nobody will
ever pollute POV with platform-specific crud like COM and DirectX or a
shortsighted implementation of Unix shared libraries (as in panorama)
while the POV-Team is there to exercise some control over the
direction of development.

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