[cad-linux] Status of BRL-CAD development (was Re: test)

Things have been pretty busy with the BRL-CAD project with lots of  
interesting parallel development efforts in progress.  I've not had  
the time to send out our usual updates and announcements to the cad- 
linux mailing lists of late simply because we've been busy working to  
make things better.  For those wondering what we're working on,  
though, our main development priorities are predominantly focused in  
four main areas which you can read about at http://brlcad.org/BRL- 
CAD_Priorities.png (727KB PNG).  That should give folks a good idea  
for what our roadmap and priorities look like for the next couple years.

A couple new developers have joined the team recently and are quickly  
getting up to speed with the codebase.  You can see one of the latest  
offerings from them on our website ( http://brlcad.org ) that came  
out of one individual's *training* nonetheless, where the developer  
made a really nice automatic and accurate implicit tire generation  
tool.  We've also been making great progress on our BREP/NURBS  
implementation along with major effort going into refactoring our  
sources for a new editor interface.

Also noteworthy, we're just finishing up our run in the 2008 Google  
Summer of Code.  It was an outstanding summer where we had four  
students working hard on various projects for BRL-CAD.  I intend to  
send out more details about how that went later but  some highlights  
of that effort are that we now have a new modeler interface under  
development, several new primitives implemented, and the beginnings  
of comprehensive parametric equation support for constraints.  Since  
the program was so successful, this is something we'll likely  
continue to participate in as a source for new features and (more  
importantly) new developer talent.

Lots of folks (and I do mean lots) have made it very clear that they  
want a better graphical user interface for BRL-CAD.  We've known this  
for years and are working on making things drastically different and  
much better.  We're a very large solid modeling package, though, with  
a *lot* of functionality that the new interface needs to support.  We  
of course will do things incrementally, but there is still a whole  
lot of ground work required.  We're also in production use, so we're  
very careful about testing everything to make sure our  
representations are accurate, robust, and high-performance.  It's  
going to take a while to do things right.

Cheers!
Sean

p.s. The BRL-CAD_Priorities image is a work-in-progress and likely  
will change, but the content is still pretty solid (no pun  
intended).  If you'd like to help out, whether you are a developer or  
not, please do get in touch.


On Sep 13, 2008, at 4:55 AM, Patrick McLaughlin wrote:

> I'm still interested,  but not as a coder - primarily want to know  
> what is
> available and/or coming down the pipe in Linux based CAD
>
> Pat McLaughlin
> Alberta, Canada
>
>
> On September 10, 2008 06:16 pm, Moises CastrOporto wrote:
>> Maybe active but only a little :)
>> mOe:)
>> 2008/9/10 john kosty <john_kosty@xxxxxxxxx>
>>
>>> Testing...
>>> this group still active?
>>>
>>>  John Kosty
>>> 828 Ralph McGill Boulevard
>>> Atlanta, Georgia 30306
>>> 404.447.3608
>>> john_kosty@xxxxxxxxx
>

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