Thanks, Chris.  When I first released DKBTrace, my feeling was that I 
had a lot of fun developing it and rendering amazing pictures.  I wanted 
to share that feeling with others so that others could experience the 
same joy.

That's what I feel about this project.  PigeonTalk is meant to get 
people excited about programming by giving them worlds to play in 
(graphics, sound, music, AI, etc.) and letting them explore.

I'm also using it as a way to explore new programming paradigms.  I want 
to get away from programming as a text-based activity.  We've come so 
far in computing that we shouldn't need to restrict ourselves to text 
editors and compilers in order to write our programs. Programs are built 
on concepts.  Let's find a say to visualize those concepts and edit the 
visualizations. We need better tools.

 From a POV-Ray point of view, imagine a scene editor where a plane or a 
sphere is shown as a block (look at Scratch or Blockly) using an icon of 
a plane or a sphere? What if a texture block could show a small sphere 
rendered in that texture? What if a color value showed a square with 
that color? What if a camera definition could show a simple scene from 
that perspective? A light source could show you a simple scene rendered 
from the location of the light source?  Would that make it easier to 
look at your SDL script and understand what's going on?

I'm excited by where this could go.  I hope others can share in that 
excitement.

David

On 2022-02-04 1:11 a.m., Chris Cason wrote:
> I wish David the best and hope the kickstarter meets its goal (and have 
> backed the campaign myself as I'm keen to see where this goes).
> 
> For those who aren't aware, it was David's contribution of the DKBTrace 
> source code that formed the basis of the first version of POV-Ray, so 
> without him POV-Ray as we know it would simply not exist.
> 
> I'll also add that in my opinion the fact he was able to create a 
> functional SDL-based raytracer that ran on 80's-era microcomputers 
> speaks well of his ability as a software engineer; this gives me 
> confidence that if funded the IDE will do all that it sets out to do.
> 
> -- Chris

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