So, I've begun poking and prodding the POV-Ray code a bit lately, due to 
my first foray into adding an on-screen indicator of which blocks are 
actively rendering. (It works, but I'm not proud of how hacky it is for 
some situations :) )

When I say normal map, I mean the RGB values are mapped to the XYZ of a 
surface normal.

I've been looking at the bump map code and from what I can see, it 
wouldn't be terribly hard to add this capability, controlled by a switch 
on the bump_map image specification.

Are there any caveats that I am missing here... was there a technical 
reason why this option wasn't implemented?

I'm thinking of adding something like rgb_normals to the bump_map as a 
switch to change how the maps are handled.

The other thing I am investigating is putting together a client and 
server architecture to allow for clustering, since the front and 
back-end are now separate.

Probably with a "virtual" back-end on the front-end piece that would 
pass to a coordinating server, and a virtual front-end to the server 
piece that would pass the messages to the actual render engine (I think 
I saw a few weeks someone here was doing something similar...)

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