My apologies man, I didn't know the posts were going here as my reader (iOS
NewsTap) was not subbed to this group, I intended no disrespect. :)

Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> Why is our community in trouble? It seems to me that over the last 
> couple of years at least there has been quite a lot of activity by our 
> respected POV-Ray developers.
> 

Beyond the google trends result that the searches for pov have decreased
100x since 2004, I am considering the volume of posts, new/extant pages
about pov or with pov content, places I see Pov mentioned around the web,
etc compared to the same from around lets say, 1994-1998 or so.

There were once numerous Pov webrings, many new folks coming through all
the time, loads of IRC activity, all kinds of unofficial patches,
specifically pov supporting shareware...substantially all of that
has...ebbed. :'-(

Us old guys and the badasses writing the code are all that is left it
seems. I have seen a lot go away over the last twenty something years.

> 
> Maybe...
> 

Anything that we can do which would drive more people to use Pov I am down
for, and I think that will be achieved through having certain (I don't have
a list) features combined with the quality of render, speed and one of the
most important things....having plugins for commonly used modeling packages
that interop with PovRay.

Getting textures from app A to render in pov...thats one hellova sticky
bit. Interop is a big, difficult thing, but ultimately you see that the
fastest growing renderers grow precisely because of the properties I listed
above.

If I am missing anything let me know.

> 
> There has been a drop of activity, mainly on the users side, with the 
> old guard turning away to other activities for instance but maybe also 
> because of age. Maybe that was due to the state-of-the-art of POV-Ray, 
> maybe not; I seem to remember some discussion about this in the past. 
> However, there has also been some new additions to the community, and I 
> think that - coming out of the "experimental" (?) stage - images have 
> become more complex/involved and/or needing more time and thought to be 
> composed. It certainly has evolved for me like that. And talking of age, 
> my own POV-Ray production is slowly dwindling over the years and that is 
> largely due to those same years accumulating on my shoulders. At 
> seventy, I am not as productive any more as I was twenty years ago.
> 

I am merely 35 (for the next few weeks lol), but I look back fondly on my
time with this community. Pov has a place, and as long as we can
strategically select and implement certain things that we know directly
influence render package adoption, as evidenced by many out there, Pov will
live.

Pov was formed under a different precept that governs recent packages,
primarily this has been discussed above already but put simply it comes
down to speed, quality and interoperability.

Pov largely has the quality, it can have the speed, and it needs the
interoperability. It has a feature set that is just awesome, and if we can
get the speed and interop part down, and get the word out, I think we will
be golden.

> 
> Again, I am not convinced personally that POV-Ray "slowly withers" but I 
> would like to hear other opinions on that.
> 

If you do not think so, go to Google trends, type in pov-ray, select from
2004 until today.

Its dire, man, dire.

It has decreased 100x.

> To me it has opened several artistic doors as it gave me the possibility 
> to express almost perfectly what I dream about.
> 

The worlds you make are pretty dang cool man. :)

Ian

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