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On Wed, 8 Jul 1998 05:02:48 -0400, Justin Rogers <dig### [at] 3nnet> wrote:
>    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.

You'd do better to start with the Unix source.  This idea has been done to
death, and even the POV Team has plans to implement it in version 4. 
Before you spend too much time on this, you might want to look at some of
the available implementations and see if they already do what you're
trying to do.

>    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 =

If you think it's easy to do, then you haven't tried to do it yet.  Let me
save you some trouble: POV uses a lot of global variables, and they all get
changed in strange ways at strange times.  If you lock them with critical 
sections, only one thread will be running most of the time anyway.  If you 
don't, you'll corrupt the frame quite quickly.  If you make them all 
thread-local, you'll still be working on it when POV4.0 comes out.

I have some code I wrote for my motion-blur patch that would help with 
multithreading, because it moves most of the globals into the frame structure
where they belong, but even I don't have the hubris to believe that 
multithreading would be "easy."

>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 =

Nonsense.  Thread switching is a very processor-intensive operation.  That
processor time could be better used doing rendering.  If you run more than
one rendering thread on a single-processor machine, I can guarantee it'll be
slower overall.  It would only be faster on IO-bound processes, and rendering
isn't one.

>    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.  

Uh-huh.  Sure.  Whatever.  Look, we're not morons, okay?  Subclassing would
be at best a kludge.  Among other things, it wouldn't set the variable that
POV checks to know when a file has changed.  No, thanks, we'll do it the 
right way if we do it at all.

>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.

This would actually be nice.  I wouldn't mind having that myself.  Can it 
shell out to POV as well?

>    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.  

Great, that's what we need.  Fragment the language to hell and back so 
nobody stands a chance of understanding every flavor of it.  It's not the 
language that most people want improved, it's the available primitives, 
textures, and transformations.  The one thing I hear asked for over and over 
is nonlinear transformations, but the reason that hasn't been done is nobody 
knows how to do it.

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