ABX wrote:
On Sun, 10 Nov 2002 17:43:46 EST, "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom>
wrote:
>> However, I'm looking at this from a user's perspective, not a programmers.

> But this is 'povray.programming' group.

Who else would I ask for changes and patches but the programmers who wrote
it?

> If POVRAY could be outdated, slow and not efficent why manufacturers use
> it to proof their computers/processors are fast ?

Because it's known to be slow? You can caculate Pi to a few thousand decimal
places to bench test a computer's speed, bench testing doesn't require
useful programs. But then, since when does POV have to be useful. It's
free.

Using POV as a bench test is not impressive. What would be impressive is if
you could name a film company that used it to do some computer generated
graphics for a film. If you could name a somewhat famous artist or
illustrator who used it to do their work. If you could name POV programmers
who went on to work with Pixar or some other noted computer graphics firm.
The last case I assume to be more likely than the first two. POV is a
programmer's ray tracer and programmers such as yourself don't even seem to
respect users.

> What happened with that code delivered from Intel and introduced in 3.5 ?

Hell if I even know what you're talking about.

> Can you start scripts from Corel to achive something on Amiga without
> additional tools ?

Why should I care? I don't have an Amiga and I don't think they make them
any more.

> Would it be possible to create macro by macro online ?

Well, things that function like macros, yes, Corel scripts and plugins. They
can be shared online.

> Would it be safe to start compiled plugin ?

Why not?

> Can you promise nobody would use it for viruses ?

Nope. In fact, Corel script has already been used to write a virus. It is
possible to compile Corel scripts and sell them as plugins. It is possible
to put worms and viruses in them.

Are you sure someone couldn't write a virus into a POV macro now? POV can
write files, it supposedly writes text files, however, what if someone were
to look at a virus program in a debugger and then write a macro that wrote
that to a file as string literals? Are certain parts of the ASCII character
set not allowed in string literals after backslashes or not?

> If you can write plugin in Pascal/C why can't you write it as separate application
> for your own and it put it in Tools menu of POV-Ray.

Eventually, I want to. However, time and lack programming resources stand in
the way. POV gives me a lot of overhead for things I don't have to write
myself. If I wrote a separate program I'd have to figure out how to deal
with image files of at least one format, write more code to display the
work so I could see it, and a shit load of other stuff like that.

Better see how far I can get with my idea using POV. If I can get it working
as macros then move to C and use the macros as pseudocode.

> It can ask you for inputs and put output in Clipboard so you can put it into POV
> editor with simple Ctrl+V.

Yea, that's one way. Another way is to just have the program write an
include file.

> Note we are here platform independant community. I know what OS use Warp only
> becouse of off-topic group, and I know what OS use Christopher James Huff
> becouse he had site with mac in url, but for example I never know what OS
> currently use Christoph Hormann or Peter Popov becouse I don't need to know.
> We can share our knowledges and sources becouse povray is _well_written_
> platform independant application. I recently counted 3.5 was sucesfully
> compiled with about 7 compilers on different platforms and I have two next to
> try.

This platform independence you seek may come at a price. Some of the systems
you want to run on are becoming too obsolete.

Also, I recently bought an AGP Xtasy 6564 2D/3D accelerator card that has
got most of my other graphics programs really zooming and looking better.
But not POV. In order to interface with this card you have to be using
DirectX or openGL. DirectX is Windows only. I don't know about openGL -- is
that suppose to be platform independent? If you can't use either of those
you can't take advantage of some major graphics technology advances.

> person wrote four years ago: http://news.povray.org/povray.programming/16984/
> And you know what ? He is now in povray team and he still not introduced
> pluging system. He must be just lazy.... ;-)

Okay, it's hard to do. It may be impossible for platform independent
systems.
And no one is paying you to do this, so why care?




 --normdoering

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