Eugene Arenhaus wrote:
> 

> Hi.
> 

> Here are some thoughts about what POV-Ray 4 could look like.
> 


Hi!

What you write seem to me like a very good idea even
though there have been many negative responses in this 

newsgroup. A somewhat different suggestion rather than 

to implement your comments in a rewritten povray 4 

would be to gather a few (4-5) raytracer programmers 

and create a completely new (free!) raytracer based on
the experience we have drawn from povray. The concept 

would be the same, a scriptable raytracer engine based
on a formal language rather than a GUI, but one would 

get the chance to implement everything in a "cleaner" 

and more OO etc way...

I have been thinking for quite some time about 

implementing a povray like raytracer (not sharing any 

piece of code!) to face both the problems you mentioned
in your earlier comments and to get a chanche to 

implement a few other conceptual ideas (I will not dvelve
into those here, the posting would become very large 

otherwise). I think a clean restart on a completely 

separate program (with a completly different name and 

not using a single line of pov code or anything the like) 

would be the best since it probably would take a long 

time before the program becomes good and popular with 

users (the conceptuall ideas, both yours and mine,will 

probably have to evolve before they become 

"user-friendly". Syntax,Semantics etc will need to 

change) and facing such major changes as you proposed 

it would be best if users and developers don't see it 

as just another version of Povray.

Two negative aspects of creating a new raytracer would 

be that the math's have to be redone (immoral and 

illegal to reuse code from povray) and the risk of not 

becoming popular among the users.

So to the conclusion... are you interested in writing a 

*new* raytracer? If so I would be happy to discuss design 

issues and brainstorm features. Is anyone else (serious) 

interested in writing a *new* raytracer? It's an enourmous
task to do so but it would realy be fun...

/ Mathias Broxvall

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