I have been going through all of the messages on the newsgroup as I have just subscribed to them this passed day. As I look I see many different ideas and expansions of POV that need to be made or that people would like made. As I go through I am compiling a list of grievances and wants and I am going to post it now and ask that if such an option has already been added whether by a patch or by another program then please let me know before I expend undue effort on the creation of such an option.

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.

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 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 whether those threads would work on an image or part of an image -ThreadPart = 1 -ThreadPart = 2.... That way you could render multiple frames at a time or quickly render a single image.

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. 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.

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. And some of the newer Ray-Tracers might find the ease of use of Basic to be a comfort... Not to mention with the additon of a couple of Java classes Java itself could be extended to do some rudimentary Ray-Tracing from a simple POV-Java file. These lexical modifiers would be in the form of plugins and source files would carry different extensions to denote their different - .PCPP, .PJAVA, and .PBASIC. A couple of other languages may be accounted for as well. Depending on how much response I get to this posting and what everyone else wants.