POvray should contine to be developed as it is, a seperate entity. its one
of the render engines strongest points compared to other commercial high end
software. (more features would not go amiss tho - and maybe quicker
ingegration of the various patches)

Moray on the other hand, needs to be able to keep up with the latest POVray
developments (ie UVPOV) , the best and simplest method i can think of is its
plugin system, which seems to have gotten over most of the early hiccups

Moray would vastly benifit from a script type plugin, for example, one that
you can paste a chunk of while do's into and it will build the output as
moray objects, on that same note the ability to parse POV script would be a
real step forward - even a limited subset of the full language would be
extremly usefull - however wether this should be as a plugin or part of
moray depends on who would be best suited to write and maintain it (i think
Lutz would shudder somewhat if this was lumped on his shoulders!!)

A simpler plugin system (as discussed on sdk-list) would be a real
advantage, something allong the lines of beginner VB would be perfect - draw
your UI then write simple and easy to learn code to power it.

(I have just started VB6 and i am amazed at how short the learning curve
really is - ok there are 1 million and 1 things i am doing badly, my code is
about as optomised as a pair of giant clown shoes with running spikes on,
and there are thousands of things i just dont know how to do)

But, would a moray plugin system need anything more complicated than drawing
common controls, naming them, and some form of basic code to tie it all
together, especially if the plugin is only going to manipulate or create
objects in moray.

more complex plugins may well be suited to the current VC SDK system, think
about it, if your going to program a new render engine or animation system,
and think you can accomplish this at the outset, you most likely already use
VC or another high end dev tool.

Moray would also benifit from support of other solids based render engines
(some one mentioned BMRT) but this would ONLY be worth doing if moray could
be as compatable with that system as it is with POVray, being able to use a
only a subset of the target render engines capabilities would be almost
pointless - a bit like the early polyray plugin.

Moray would also benifit from an overhauled patch modelling system,
personally i find the current system a nightmare to use properly, and as
spatch seems to be dead in the water these days maybe a merger of sorts
would be a good idea.

Better CSG evaluation is also needed, having played with truespace recently
and watched it perfectly evaluate CSG objects on screen, moray seems quite
clumsy compared.

a texture cache would be nice for the tex editor, so libraried textures once
rendered can be previewed instantly. but while this would not be a complex
task to program, having a large chunk of valuable HD space taken up may not
be what everyone wants.

object masking would be essential as well, meaning the ability from within
moray to turn of parts of the scene, replacing them with a single large
bounding box. currently i have difficulty modelling when this start to get
very complex - there are just to many objects for me to be able to see what
i am doing, even though where ever possable i model everything seperatly and
combine later. this would also help to combat big scene slowdown.

another thing that would help with big scene slowdown, would be a better
method of redrawing the scene, Moray tends to overdraw the same pixel many
many times (once for every object that intersects that pixel).

the abitlty to color objects in the modelling windows would be nice also, i
dont know about anyone else but playing hunt the grey object in a haystack
of grey objects gets a little tricky.

====

Ok thats me about requested out  :), dont get me worng, moray is one of my
favorite modelling tools and i love it to bits.

Rick

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