DISCLAIMER:
            1. I'm not sure if this is the right board to post this Q
            2. I know the devs have put a lot of hard work into POV
            3. I'm not being pushy, just curious!

QUESTION:

What is the current status of POV-Ray development? Is it on pause, or are
steps being made toward a next 3.x release or even 4.0? I haven't really
heard anything since the 3.5 release and I was wondering as to what might
be coming. Are there concrete lists of features slated for
inclusion/update/rewrite in future releases?

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Don't ask. Just wait.
AFAIK, POV-Ray 3.51 is being made,
what exactly is taken care of in that update
I don't know.
POV-Ray 4 is so far just a "myth", I guess
once 3.5 is "fixed", meaning that minor issues
and rare bugs (if there indeed are any) are
considered "done", we'll use that for some
time, and then rejoice when we hear that
POV 4 is going to the Beta-Stages.

Consider that POV-Ray is a group-effort
of talented programmers which don't get
paid for doing this (hopefully they get paid
for other work! :-) and sure spend a lot of
time taking care of things so that people
not that much into programming POV-Ray
themselves (like myself) still have a functional
and predictiv script to play with.

As a sidenote: everytime this question is asked,
people say they're curious, not pushing, but
actually, if you just use the web-interface and
do a search, you'll find that about once every
month this question gets asked, and the same
answers are received:
Its finished when its finished.

The POV-Team will surely keep us updated
if and when they have something worthwhile
to say regarding the development of actual
or next release of POV-Ray.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: no_lights (@) digitaltwilight.de


> DISCLAIMER:
>             1. I'm not sure if this is the right board to post this Q
>             2. I know the devs have put a lot of hard work into POV
>             3. I'm not being pushy, just curious!
>
> QUESTION:
>
> What is the current status of POV-Ray development? Is it on pause, or are
> steps being made toward a next 3.x release or even 4.0? I haven't really
> heard anything since the 3.5 release and I was wondering as to what might
> be coming. Are there concrete lists of features slated for
> inclusion/update/rewrite in future releases?
>


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.518 / Virus Database: 316 - Release Date: 11.09.2003

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Tim Nikias v2.0 wrote:
>Don't ask. Just wait.

Yeah, thought as much. It just seems that other open-source projects (eg.
Mozilla) seem to do a better job at keeping the community posted on
progress. This may be due to the fact that there are more people working on
that and so significant progress is made in regular intervalls.

I'm not such a regular on these boards, but it just seems that the devs are
a little reluctant when it comes to development updates. Maybe if they were
a little more proactive with announcements, then pesky people like me would
stop pestering them :-)

Post a reply to this message

Jake wrote:
> Tim Nikias v2.0 wrote:
> 
>>Don't ask. Just wait.
> 
> 
> Yeah, thought as much. It just seems that other open-source projects (eg.
> Mozilla) seem to do a better job at keeping the community posted on
> progress. This may be due to the fact that there are more people working on
> that and so significant progress is made in regular intervalls.

Oh, this once again has potential for a very long thread without any 
useful result...

I'd suggest you simply realize that POV-Ray is not like any other open 
source project.  This is off-topic but i am writing this answer on a 
mozilla version which is crashing quite often and even if you don't 
share this opinion many people like to have a reliable and well tested 
program instead of one up-to-date but buggy beta version after the 
other.  So much for the 'significant progress in regular intervalls'.

Keeping the community posted on progress is something different but you 
should notice that the next version is a bugfix release so there are no 
new features and therefore nothing to talk about.

When it comes to planning and adding new features this is different but 
most new features introduced in the past few years started as unofficial 
patches and where developed with quite intensive interaction with the 
user community.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 2 Sep. 2003 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

Post a reply to this message

Jake wrote:
> DISCLAIMER:
>             1. I'm not sure if this is the right board to post this Q
>             2. I know the devs have put a lot of hard work into POV
>             3. I'm not being pushy, just curious!
>
> QUESTION:
>
> What is the current status of POV-Ray development? Is it on pause, or
> are steps being made toward a next 3.x release or even 4.0? I haven't
> really heard anything since the 3.5 release and I was wondering as to
> what might be coming. Are there concrete lists of features slated for
> inclusion/update/rewrite in future releases?

Perhaps some developer diaries / blog would help kill this question.

-- 
Rick

Kitty5 NewMedia http://Kitty5.com
POV-Ray News & Resources http://Povray.co.uk
TEL : +44 (01270) 501101 - ICQ : 15776037

PGP Public Key
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x231E1CEA

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In article <3f6e2d6a$1@news.povray.org> , "Rick [Kitty5]" 
<spa### [at] kitty5com> wrote:

> Perhaps some developer diaries / blog would help kill this question.

No, it would only result in more questions as *most* people tend to not
understand certain things unless they see them.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message

Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> In article <3f6e2d6a$1@news.povray.org> , "Rick [Kitty5]"
> <spa### [at] kitty5com> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps some developer diaries / blog would help kill this question.
>
> No, it would only result in more questions as *most* people tend to
> not understand certain things unless they see them.

It's such a shame we're all so retarded. (not that I expected for one moment
that Thorsten 'grumpy' Froehlich would be one to volunteer)

-- 
Rick

Kitty5 NewMedia http://Kitty5.com
POV-Ray News & Resources http://Povray.co.uk
TEL : +44 (01270) 501101 - ICQ : 15776037

PGP Public Key
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x231E1CEA

Post a reply to this message

In article <3f6ec2ef@news.povray.org> , "Rick [Kitty5]" 
<spa### [at] kitty5com> wrote:

>>> Perhaps some developer diaries / blog would help kill this question.
>>
>> No, it would only result in more questions as *most* people tend to
>> not understand certain things unless they see them.
>
> It's such a shame we're all so retarded. (not that I expected for one moment
> that Thorsten 'grumpy' Froehlich would be one to volunteer)

No, but have you actually considered what kind of description would be
needed to actually make this information useful at all?

For example this from the current change log.  Without knowing what was
actually changed, most of the information is essentially useless, especially
for a non-programmer:

Change 2187 on 2003/08/25 by thorsten@host27
 Changes a few casts
 Removes pointless use of floating-point math
 Enables beta message
 Some error message text changes to match rest of code
 Renames a statistics enum to avoid a name confusion
 Other little tweaks

Change 2179 on 2003/08/19 by chrisc@lilliput
 Fix precedence error in parse.cpp re:bounding slabs.
 Fix problem in optin.cpp regaring spurious warnings about needing quotes.

Change 2177 on 2003/08/18 by calimet@lavender
 [unix] Updated configure.ac : a few internal mods for sanity.
        Updated prebuild.sh:
        - fix for build failure in unix/ on cygwin (misuse of X_CFLAGS
          inherited from 3.5)
        - little tweaks in the install and uninstall targets.

Change 1931 on 2002/10/05 by thorsten@host27
 Adds POVMSStream_xxx utility functions for reading and
  writing data in network byteorder. The byteorder is determined
  automatically at runtime! Only on platforms on which IEEE 754
  floating-point numbers are not standard, the macros
  POVMSIEEEFloat, POVMSFloatToPOVMSIEEEFloat,
  POVMSIEEEFloatToPOVMSFloat and HexToPOVMSIEEEFloat
  have to be redefined.

Or do you expect us to use our spare time and write something such that it
cannot be misunderstood instead of actually fixing bugs and improving code?
And what if something wasn't written for say four weeks in such a diary?
Who would then deal with the flood of emails asking if POV-Ray is dead?  You
aren't the one having to answer all the odd questions people can come up
with every day.  And you would be surprised how odd the questions can be!

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:3f6ed0b6$1@news.povray.org...
>
> No, but have you actually considered what kind of description would be
> needed to actually make this information useful at all?

A short webpage somewhere just outlining the POV development process, an
explanation that 3.51 is a bugfix, and a couple of paras on pov 4 (explaining
that it'll be a complete rewrite and why) - basically just enough to answer the
faqs regarding pov development.

I don't claim that such info. would be 'useful', just 'of interest'.

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Jake wrote:
> 
> QUESTION:
> 
> What is the current status of POV-Ray development?

The other day Thorsten typed out some new code and compiled it.
That's all you need to know.

Regards,
John

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