Provide povray.exe on Windows/provide consistent CLI on all platforms

[binki]

The Windows installer installs pvengine.exe and things. There is no povray.exe which behaves like the unix povray command.

I thought that when I first used povray some number of years ago, the Windows build was just the unix CLI but running on Windows. I could be wrong, that was a long time ago and I think I was using Windows 98 SE at the time. I recently installed the official Windows build and was taken aback when I couldn’t find something like the standard CLI interface. If you try to call it like normal you get this editor thing popping up… and you have to add extra parameters like /EXIT and /RENDER and know that you have to call pvengine instead of povray. I think I and other people would like to be able to just use the same interface regardless of what platform we’re on.

Could the next and future releases include an official build of the CLI for Windows?

For now, I’m just using the Ubuntu package through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. But then I can only launch it indirectly through bash -c povray. And while the Windows Subsystem for Linux is nice, it is not the cleanest and I assume does have overhead (though I’ve not tried benchmarking or antyhing).

[c-lipka]

POV-Ray for Windows has been a GUI application for ages now. What you used on Win 98 SE might have been a DOS version, but that has been abandoned quite a while ago.

There does exist source code and a Visual Studio project for a command-line-only version of POV-Ray, but it has been receiving only sporadic attention until now (I can't even say whether it compiles properly right now), and it has never been documented, as it was originally developed just as a showcase of how to use certain internal structures to easily bolt on a new front-end to the platform-neutral portions of the software.

We'll keep your request in mind though.

[c-lipka]

Before we can easily generate both a GUI and CLI version out of the same source code there's still a bit of refactoring to do, which we prefer to avoid in the beta phase of 3.7.1, so we'll be postponing this to 3.7.2.