On 6 Dec 2001 17:14:11 -0500, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

>Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
>: Gcc is not a serious environment for complex projects.
>
>  Really? I make my living by coding C++. We use gcc.
>  Ok, our project is not huge (about 50000 lines of code), but big enough for
>not being just a small hobby program.
Well, as there are many ppl that do complex scenes with a text editor
and povray, there can be ppl that do complex works with gcc... But, if
U don't have special needs that let U use gcc (because dunno it has a
special feature that U need), this compiler is really bad. If U want
I'll tell U why: it's slow, it lacks a good ide (kdevelop is shit, and
bugged) and a good ide boosts productivity, it lacks a good debugger
(SoftIce rules) and it lacks a good profiler too (VTUNE rules). It
lacks documentation (msdn), it's too slow, really slow, and ICC
generated code is better. What else do U need?

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 22:17:18 +0200, Peter Popov <pet### [at] vipbg> wrote:

>On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 11:29:52 GMT, ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 'kENpEX'
>Pesce) wrote:
>
>>Flame war... it seems too much for a simple, polite, discussion about
>>some topics of povray development... 
>
>We're generally gentle and polite :)
>
>>Well if someone here thinks that
>>this is a flame war I'll go away, that wasn't my objective, and if I
>>have to flame to say my opinion about povray features, and to say that
>>imho there is something that is still lacking, well I really don't
>>want to...
>
>That's the spirit!
>
>Take it easy... it's just that all these suggestions have been
>discussed over and over again and the Team have had to justify their
>modus operandi a thousand times and so on. Hey, we even had a "Beat
>LightWave" frenzy at some point! And of course, POV won :)
>
>Now seriously, everything you suggested, save displacement mapping and
>assembler coding (ok, I may have missed something), is possible. There
>is one problem: it either should be made perfect or not made at all.
>That's the POV spirit. Of course this means a lot, an awful lot of
>really hard work and research, and the related heaps of free time and
>resources... which is something Team members are known to lack
>(plainly because they spend whatever time they have left from making a
>living on working on POV).
>
>Now, it is a completely different matter if you come up with a working
>idea. Working in the see-what-my-patch-can-do-and-it-seems-stable-for-
>all-that-a-year-of-beta-testing-among-fifty-beta-testers-means sense.
>And even then you will have no guarantee. But at least it will give
>you a much better start.
Ok ok got it... In fact as I'm a new user (no I'm not, but I don't
know povray so well... well mabye I know it but I've only used it to
generate some fine background art for my desktop, mainly fractals, but
with some style in them, rendered used a quite good renderfarm) I went
to www.povray.org as usually, and then to povray.co.uk. After reading
of pov 3.5 I downloaded it, then as I'm (as I already told) a 3d gfxer
and a programmer I saw that some useful (to me?) features where still
missing. So I went to Warp's site and this is what I found:

"I would like to suggest some new features for the program. Who should
I talk to?" 
This is best discussed on the Pov news groups (news.povray.org) in
both the general news group and the windows news group. The Pov team
does skim through the message posted there and occasionaly impliment
ideas that have been posted by users. 
You may also contact any of the POV-Ray T.A.G. members with
suggestions, comments, or ideas for improvements to POV-Ray. To learn
more about the POV-Ray T.A.G. and their contact information go here:
http://tag.povray.org/. 

I mailed Warp, and he told me to post in the newsgroup, so I
configured my news reader, downloaded all the past msgs and since I
saw a similar post in povray.programming I posted my own stuff (about
pov4 since I knew that pov3.5 was fixed)...
And this is the story, now we have a huge huge thread and at the
beginning someone told not so nice things too, but I don't feel that I
did anything wrong. Sorry for that, I still think that is not so easy
for a newbie to understand povray development process and features by
reading the faqs (and Warp's faq is the best one, the others are
shitty). Also I don't know why I have to read everything about pov 3.5
on povray.co.uk and not on www.povray.org.

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 06 Dec 2001 23:22:05 +0200, Vahur Krouverk
<vkr### [at] comtradeee> wrote:

>Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:45:27 -0500, Alessandro Coppo <a.c### [at] iolit>
>> wrote:
>>>The ONLY reason why I haven't just downloaded BMRT and stopped thinking 
>>>about POV is that BMRT is even less open source than POVRay!!!
>>>
>> 
>> Just use PovMan... BMRT is too slow...
>Huh? So far I had intention to only read this biig thread due to lack of time, 
>
>but this statement makes me really to ask:is BMRT really slower than 
>POVMan in similar scenes?? I really doubt it, especially if one takes 
>into account that latest versions of BMRT allow to use precompiled 
>shaders, which give performance boost 40-250% (according to 
>c.g.r.renderman NG???) and are written by L. Gritz, who has learned CG 
>in university, worked in Pixar and should know much more about CG than 
>me (who has hacked this latest version of POVMan without any education 
>in CG or similar areas)? According to my small performance tests most of 
>time goes into texture calculation, so if one uses shaders, which are 
>calculated by current implementation of shader's VM, then performance 
>hit, which is not small, should be taken into account...
>One big problem with shaders in POV-Ray (if we are talking about 
>RenderMan shaders ) is that quite number of them is intended for 
>parametric surfaces (in RenderMan most (or all?) primitive surfaces 
>could be described as u-v parametric surfaces) and using such shaders in 
>POV-Ray limits their use into small number of primitives, which have u-v 
>parametrization implemented. And as I understand, separate step of 
>compiling shader for POV-Ray seems to be too hard (or complex) for 
>users, it would be better, if shader is described in POV-Ray SL (scene 
>lenguaje) or compiled transparently.

I don't really know. I've seen that BMRT is *really* slow, and povman
seemed better but I haven't done real comparisons. Btw BMRT is too
slow to be really used imho, so U should try povman... :)

>>>P.S.: why the POVTeam asked in fact for feedbacks in the past about POV4 
>>>feature list when all of you already have granitic ideas about what is 
>>>"good" and what is not? I do not ask questions when I have already made up 
>>>my mind.
>>>
>> Yes, is seems that noone has doubs about povray, its future and what
>> should be done
>
>
>Sorry to be OT here, but it really seems to me, that 'older 
>>habitants' started immediately 'to circle wagons', as you hit this NG 
>>with all these proposals. On one hand I quite understand them (as my 
>>butter to bread
>>comes from software projects, where responsible people (myself 
>included!) are quite wary about changes in existing software development 
>process or source code due to business risks) and such topics were 
>discussed many times ('beaten to death') in this server NG-s, but on the 
>other hand I'd like to see more openness from people, as some responses 
>are quite defensive, seems like people take proposals in this thread as 
>personal attacks or flamewar attempts.

This is really true... I'm not doing any critic to current povray
status, but many (not every) ppl here replyied me just saying this is
impossible or that, povray already supports this thing and better than
every other renderer, even if later I have demonstrated that something
were false, the thread just died... For example the nurbs stuff, most
ppl here believed that those should be done by the modeller so the
mesh support in povray was already the "state of the art". Well, when
I demonstrated that most commercial renderers support nurbs directly
noone talked about this, they said those ideas are already known...
How can U tell that if many ppl believed that this was simply a bad
thing to do?

>One note about POV-Ray: in many cases you said, that you like to see,
>that POV-Ray had more 'features', which are in commercial renderers. Yes, 
>it would be good to have faster (in terms of rendering and scene creation) 
>and more powerful application, but there is number of renderers competing in this
>area and doing it better and faster for professionals; I see POV-Ray 
>mainly as cheap (in terms of price, not possibilities!) tool for 
>hobbists and beginners in CG area, from POV-Ray they can move to more 
>proffessional and effective tools (like H.E. Day did).

Well I think that this is not the objective of povray... If this is,
all the stuff I posted here is a complete nonsense...

Post a reply to this message

>On Wed, 05 Dec 2001 20:01:56 GMT, ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 'kENpEX'
>Pesce) wrote:
>
>>nowdays everything is modelled with nurbs, subdivision surfaces and polygons
>
>Really?>
>Real modelling tools (not artistic, mind you, modelling) don't even
>have a NURBS primitive? To name a few - Mechanical Desktop,
>SolidWorks, CATIA, Pro/Engineer, Mathra... NURBS are the lowest common
>denominator tool accessible to everyone and anyone.

Sorry about that, as I'm a graphic artist I was talking about the
field of artistic modelling (mainly organic stuff). Of course I know
that many other ppl use povray to do scientific visualization, cad,
architectural stuff etc, but I think that those fields are already
covered and that povray really lacks only in that one (I don't know
really, of course I know more of my field). Again, sorry...

>Tell me, how many ways do you know of drawing a curve? I can mention
>about ten and of those I've used only five. 

Mhm... Too many...

>In Mathra there are over
>two hundred (200)! Most of what is used now has been developed there
>and consequently leaked out, most notably Bezier splines (or at least
>a few types of them).

I don't know this cad system (is that a cad?). The only 3d modelling
program that is more cad-ish that I use is rhinoceros (and I really
like it too)

>So from the point of view of what *could* be implemented, NURBS are
>almost as primitive as point-clouds :)
???>

>Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
>Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
>TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

Post a reply to this message

In article <3c0ff1d7.41227138@news.povray.org> , ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 
'kENpEX' Pesce) wrote:

> Also I don't know why I have to read everything about pov 3.5
> on povray.co.uk and not on www.povray.org.

Oh, you can read all about 3.5 on www.povray.org in the documentation.

Personally I think users should discuss features they like on their pages.
It is not the job of the POV-Team do create a page full of "marketing
information" about POV-Ray.  Users being free to say what they like and
dislike on their own independent page is much better, IMO.

    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

Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
: And this is the story, now we have a huge huge thread and at the
: beginning someone told not so nice things too, but I don't feel that I
: did anything wrong.

  I think that your mistake was to use an inappropriate "tone of voice"
when making the suggestions. (Of course you might not really had that
attitude when you wrote that, but it's really difficult to interpret the
attitude of the writer from just written text, without hearing and seeing,
which are essential parts of communication.)
  People got the impression that your "tone of voice" and attitude was of
the type "commercial programs are so much more advanced than povray, which
is just slow and old; thus you should definitely add this and this and that
if you want to catch up the professional programs". With this type of text
people get easily the impression that you are underestimating povray and
calling it just "a toy, which is funny to play with, but which you really can't
use for serious business".
  Nobody likes that. Write a post with that "tone of voice" about linux in
a linux newsgroup and you'll get flamed. Or gimp, or emacs, or any other big
free software.

  It's better to make a humble approach and ask things in a more subtle way.
Never underestimate the knowledge or intelligence of people. Never assume
that you know things better than everyone else here.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

Post a reply to this message

Yes, I know, I should stop, but by reading the ng I had another little
idea, this is so litte and stupid that mabye can find its way: add a
switch to have zbuffer output (mhm and mabye normal output too). This
is useful to do postprocessing... I won't do that again, I promise :)

Post a reply to this message

Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
: But, if
: U don't have special needs that let U use gcc (because dunno it has a
: special feature that U need), this compiler is really bad. If U want
: I'll tell U why: it's slow, it lacks a good ide (kdevelop is shit, and
: bugged) and a good ide boosts productivity, it lacks a good debugger
: (SoftIce rules) and it lacks a good profiler too (VTUNE rules).

  Bullshit.
  What makes you think it's slow? I haven't noticed it being any slower than
other compilers.
  A properly configured Emacs and a proper knowledge of makefiles is the best
IDE one may wish.
  It does not lack a good debugger: gdb.
  It does not lack a good profiler: gprof.
  The code generated by it is quite good. For example for Sparc the speed
of the code it generates is closely comparable to Sun's own optimized
compiler. Gcc optimizes the size of the binary a lot better than Sun's
compiler.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

Post a reply to this message

In article <3c0ff1d7.41227138@news.povray.org> , ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 
'kENpEX' Pesce) wrote:

> I mailed Warp, and he told me to post in the newsgroup, so I
> configured my news reader, downloaded all the past msgs and since I
> saw a similar post in povray.programming I posted my own stuff (about
> pov4 since I knew that pov3.5 was fixed)...
> And this is the story, now we have a huge huge thread and at the
> beginning someone told not so nice things too, but I don't feel that I
> did anything wrong.

What surprises me is that all people who suggest features that they have
seen in commercial packages always assume their suggestion to add this and
that feature to POV-Ray is new.  I mean, come on, do you really think we are
all that ignorant to not know what features other/commercial packages have?

Besides, Warp's FAQ already explains why your suggestions 5 and 8.  The FAQ
also explains that POV-Ray is not a sole triangle mesh renderer, yet you
ignore this suggestion and suggest 7.

The 3.5 announcement from Sept. 2000 which you read as you know the feature
set in 3.5 is final (as you said yourself) mentions that patches that are
not included were not included because they have problems.  This doesn't
keep you from suggesting 3.

Your suggestion 4 is in the manual.  At least in the 3.5 manual there is no
more excuse for not at least checking the manual to find the focal blur
feature to find out about how it works and that it already does what you
suggest.

And you must have been aware that suggestion 1, which would *break* any
scene written before POV-Ray 4.0.  It really should not have been difficult
to guess the response to such a suggestion (hence my idea that you are only
looking for a flamewar in my first reply).

Your second suggestion isn't more diplomatic.  After all you could have
checked before saying something.  What you imply is that you know how it is
working (or what it is not doing) without ever looking at it and that
because it doesn't do what you think is fastest it is in your opinion slow.
And last but not least you really insult every developer by saying "It's
very important to speed up the whole thing."  Do you think we don't know
that a ray tracer needs to be fast?

I know myself that it isn't easy to always express ideas well in a foreign
language.  In fact it can be extremely difficult.  Unfortunately that isn't
your problem.

What you did wrong is to simply ignore the documentation and source code,
then post suggestions based on your random assumptions which you obviously
had the ability to validate first, and then expect everybody to be happy
that you suggested something everybody knew already.

The fact that you did not bother to check is the only thing that upsets me.
You have the ability to do so yet you decided to imply your ideas are so
unique you should make the suggestion anyway ... doing so simply implies
that you think you know better and thus we are just waiting for your
suggestions.  in particular you then declare your suggestions a "wish list",
which is not exactly an invitation to discussing the implementation but more
the feasibility, which is precisely what happened.

The lack of first checking the obvious was also what promoted me to suggest
"Looks like you have a few misconceptions about POV-Ray", which might have
prompted you to conclude that this might indeed be the case and you did
simply overlook or not find some information.  However, you never asked for
more information regarding what was wrong with your suggestions until now,
so assumed you were completely serious about them as they were ...

> Sorry for that, I still think that is not so easy
> for a newbie to understand povray development process and features by
> reading the faqs

Well, the reason for this is very, very simple:  The users POV-Ray are are
usually not programmers and thus the focus of FAQs is on the use and not the
development of the program...

____________________________________________________
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

On 6 Dec 2001 18:24:35 -0500, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

>Angelo 'kENpEX' Pesce <ken### [at] uniplanit> wrote:
>: And this is the story, now we have a huge huge thread and at the
>: beginning someone told not so nice things too, but I don't feel that I
>: did anything wrong.
>
>  I think that your mistake was to use an inappropriate "tone of voice"
>when making the suggestions. (Of course you might not really had that
>attitude when you wrote that, but it's really difficult to interpret the
>attitude of the writer from just written text, without hearing and seeing,
>which are essential parts of communication.)

Sorry for that, but as U say it's difficult to intrepret the attitude,
and I also don't have such great skills when writing in english. So
mabye I've sayied something wrong... Sorry

>  People got the impression that your "tone of voice" and attitude was of
>the type "commercial programs are so much more advanced than povray, which
>is just slow and old; thus you should definitely add this and this and that
>if you want to catch up the professional programs".

No, that was not what I was trying to tell. First I think that povray
has many features that other commercial renderers don't have, but I
also think that it lacks something... The main difference that I can
see is that commercial renderers are made for commercial programs
(!!!) while povray is more geared towards script-wizards. So I just
suggested, as it's a very good renderer, to make it more complete, by
adding some features that will permit easier porting of scenes made
with commercial artistic 3d modelling programs to it.

> With this type of text
>people get easily the impression that you are underestimating povray and
>calling it just "a toy, which is funny to play with, but which you really can't
>use for serious business".

I know that it can be used seriously in many fields. But it's a little
hard to use it (not impossible at the moment, it just could be better)
in the field that I care of...

>  Nobody likes that. Write a post with that "tone of voice" about linux in
>a linux newsgroup and you'll get flamed. Or gimp, or emacs, or any other big
>free software.

Yes, I know, and I think that U all were polite in replying to me...
Now I know that this wasn't a really good post, but I still think that
I was not so wrong when I posted it (because of I tried to be polite
myself) and that mabye it could be useful to someone

>  It's better to make a humble approach and ask things in a more subtle way.
>Never underestimate the knowledge or intelligence of people. Never assume
>that you know things better than everyone else here.

In my first (mhm or second) post I explictly told that I were noone
and that I knowed that many ppl there are more skilled than me and
could have had the same, or better, ideas

>-- 
>#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
>rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
>],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
>7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

Post a reply to this message