Good day ! Any information can help. So:

Jr, I must start by telling you thanks again for trying to help me to get
HGpovRay to compile last time, further than what appeared on the newsgroups
since you did send me personal emails on my request to help me with files you
had provided here. Though I still haven't managed to build hgpovray under
windows is another issue. I felt mentioning this could help keeping the talk
fair and not make you appear as a pure pressurizing ranter. Before hopefully
closing your dispute and refocusing on topic.

I must express my disagreement with this point: that both Chris Cason and Jim
Henderson would owe us anything... In fact it's the opposite. The community owes
*a lot* to them.

Note that Jim has always been a particularly adorable person, but that is
besides the point. Though he is now "retired" from this task, Jim's work on
documentation has been exemplar and not only relatively to the open source
world. It's one of the reasons I felt POV had not that much to envy to some
professional software around. POV doc is better than 3D Studio max's doc and
that's not the worse commercial one available at all.

Meanwhile on developer-side, this value is certainly acknowledged. The natural
feeling of the POV syntax in general and the way it was carefully extended for
every new feature proves it constantly.

SO, I am very glad that Chris Cason does not feel discouraged and is open to
have such a debate and keep up with all this.


*About Moray:

I hope this won't sound bitter nor jealous of its achievement because it surely
was and will be a great piece of software.
But people asking for it all the time... well, kind of slightly gets on my nerve
:-) why? when I have been striving to get some feedback for ten years, and keep
adding and fixing features to the Blender-to-POV-and-back addon, which may, or
may not, be less perfect in many ways. I get none... No, almost none, thanks to
people like Jim, Stephen, and a few others of whom you may well be. but the
point is not much feedback and even less contribution.

I would also be glad to have Moray up and running, but Blender is so feature
packed that Moray will not be much more than Wings compared to it in the best
case scenario: a subset.  There people generally answer "but Blender's interface
is akward". THESE DAYS ARE OVER. they did a complete rewrite for version 2.5 and
yet another complete rewrite for version 2.8

These changes did cost us time. We had to fix the exporter in so many ways. Now
it's getting back to its functional state of version 2.79 at last... And now
default selection is Left click. I know we didn't do all this for nothing, but I
wish others knew it as well! If all those who just wait for Moray or instead try
to rebuild their own modeler from scratch had contributed, be it just with
patient feedback, this community would already just be having fun with one hell
of a tool, and I speculate this would be source for some if not all of the
momentum, that seems to be desired by everyone participating in the present
discussion.

I did consider to rather invest all my time in Moray first, but it's build in
lower level language, that I know much less about. Currently very little of the
Blender addon is implemented in C++, only Syntax highlighting, the rest is all
Python awesomeness. If we did have more experienced programmers or if I became
myself as proficient with C, even then, I would wait for Moray to be as feature
packed as Blender before giving it primary focus.

Note that I would not exclude dedicating some time to it as a close second
however : that's why we named the add-on without restricting it to the Blender
field. I would rather see in the long run the "POV Converter" as a suite of
tools or a hub / pipeline glue between several 3D and 2D apps mutualising
resources for Blender(Python3), [Freestyle-->] Inkscape(Python3), Moray(if
Python 3.x support is an option, that would actually enable us to do something
more for it than just feedback or documentation).


*About POV:

Persistence of Vision became something worth defending for the common good of
all the digital world:

It can be the first language a child learns. Yet it actually is so powerful at
what it does that it's pretty close to rival what was used not so long ago to
produce the best feature length movies at Pixar.

If one knows his way around "non conservative" / "expressive NPR" options, it
can even be of some use in more precise work like scientific visualization, or
predictive rendering. Though a little below the "competition" (only where
spectral nature of light is involved) in this field (Luxrender has this at
heart) But POV-Ray remains unbeatable geometry wise.



So...


*What could be improved?

A)Get to open up more to other communities.

Something almost happened once:  Campbell Barton, one of the top 3 Blender devs
reached out to offer a week end of his to set up a C-Make based cross platform
build system for POV.  No-one seemed interested. (He had started and we have a
cloned archive of his files so someone with the skills could still pick it up).
What could happen then? Then the addon could be delivering a POV engine within
the Blender package. We would have the luck to benefit so much more literate
testing, debugging...

B)Modernize its image... People do not realize how lively and adapting the
software and its community are.

Here are three examples:

"Radiosity" in most software designates the technique to actually bake the
diffuse secundary bounce illumination solution to vertices (vertex color), that
is generally a very rough precision approximation of what pov does which is
elsewhere rather called  Global Illumination, the kind POV does, I believe,
being more specifically called "Irradiance" based, but please someone more
versed could correct me if I'm wrong. However this reads as if POV had no GI !

"Raytracer" In the main part of a software name is no longer used because 99% of
renderers are raytracers, currently often physically based, path tracers,
whatever... But except Freestyle and the likes, there is almost no
"non-raytracers" this makes it looks as if POV had not evolved since the
nineties.

The logo used at the head of the documentation:
"Persistence of Vision" in the Maiandra GD font with bump cracks disappearing

two shiny transparent spheres was fine then... in the nineties. Even the blue
logo on the banner of the website is more modern, but the one on the POVwin
splash screen is better than both in this regard. (please if you could avoid
abbreviating, at least the logo to "povray" that would be great for french
speakers, to which it sounds something like "RETARD" or "POORTHING", so any time
we communicate people just laugh. I personally refer to it explicitly as
Persistence of Vision in interfaces and use only the very short form POV when
lacking space... Until it gets so famous for his long lasting life that I can
get away with simply calling it "Persistence"  in most situations :-)

C) Get more self confident in current workflow to fidelize users, but please, do
not give up +RTR feature.

Though it's not a scientific approach, I sometimes have the curiosity to examine
some 3d rendering / POV related keywords trajectories using google Trends. And
though this easily reveals how massive the requests for Blender are over POV,
however, when you reach far enough into the past, and add a real time engine
such as Unity at the very beginning of the data, it reveals that POV was at the
time bigger than today's biggest player, and that it was the object of more
curiosity than V-Ray, Renderman or MentalRay ! I really wonder what could have
provided this bubble and start to daydream about re-taping into that growth
potential for my favorite software. The real time feature does not have to be as
good as the rest. It can just be an entry point, but if it's given up, I think
it would become a bottleneck in the attractivity of the software.

https://trends.google.fr/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0150lk,%2Fm%2F0l1qq,%2Fm%2F041kyp,%2Fm%2F06bpry,%2Fm%2F0dmyvh


Sorry for the length of this message, and eventual non native speaker mistakes.
Thanks for reading, and for all the rest !

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