On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 15:19:58 EST, "normdoering" <nor### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> > If POVRAY could be outdated, slow and not efficent why manufacturers use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?

No. Becouse it is known to make various difficult floating point operations.

> You can caculate Pi to a few thousand decimal
> places to bench test a computer's speed

But that's only one type of calculations. The goal is to test real product.

> bench testing doesn't require useful programs.

Then it does not test real life.

> 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.

Nobody is looking for something impresive here (except images).

> If you could name a somewhat famous artist or
> illustrator who used it to do their work.

Sorry, I don't know _any_ famous artist who used _any_ CG. I know Picasso,
Michale Angelo, Leonardo etc ... And I know my fellows from this community who
help each other to achive something they currently need. Help is pretty fast
and older resources are usually compatible with newer versions. Best POV
artists can appear on http://www.irtc.org/ or
http://www.zazzle.com/posters/gallery/search/product_list.asp?q=POV . I would
like to be as good as some of them.

> If you could name POV programmers
> who went on to work with Pixar or some other noted computer graphics firm.

I don't know any editor who flowed from Word to Britannica. Is it so
important? 

> POV is a programmer's ray tracer and programmers such as yourself don't even seem to
> respect users.

Each one recpects each other here. That's why *users groups were created.
That's why TAG-Team appeared. That's why betatesting stage was performed.
That's why perfect documentation appeared in 3.5. Respect to the users is
fulfilled as part of community here, not part of software. I imagine POV has
to be created with respect to the previous versions, platform independence,
general design and simple mantaining in the future. Nobody said plugin feature
is not interested. But it has not to be intruduced only becouse it is
interested. It is simple against those rules. For example imagine next year
some company introduce new platform like advanced fast palmos, transmeta
modification or anything with own C++ compiler. Currently moving POV-Ray could
be simple. Personally I think some day we will have POV on mobile phone.
Having POV with plugins/macros compiled for each platform separately will
require additional amount of work to prepare safe and stable code for it. And
you never be sure if next intel/windows will be backward compatible.

> > What happened with that code delivered from Intel and introduced in 3.5 ?
>
> Hell if I even know what you're talking about.

http://news.povray.org/3d55aa5d%241%40news.povray.org

> > 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.

Does it mean POV-Ray should have features _only_ for you ?

> > 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.

I don't mean sharing online. I mean evaluate string like it could be native
script.

> > Would it be safe to start compiled plugin ?
>
> Why not?

Becouse executing anonymous exacutables is not safe.

> 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?

POV-Ray can't take responsibility for bugs in OS. But it can do it's best:
Options->Script IO Restrictions on windows and apropriate equivalent on other
platforms.

> > 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.

Like what ?

> 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.

And that's why you prefer volounteers should introduce your features for free?

> 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.

If you know C/C++ you don't have to write separated application to run
anything like pseudocode. You missed you can download sources of POV and
create own function for Parser when you call appropriate functions from POV
just like "pseudocode" you mentioned. It will not be trivial but much simpler
than writing engine for plugins or own libraries to operate on images.

> 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.

As Thorsten said you should learn a little. I suggest you to spend some time
on reading old posts. I know it can take some time but POV requires patience.

> > 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?

Becouse of all above

ABX

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