Development overview

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kandelabr
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Re: Development overview

Post by kandelabr »

abdullah wrote:Distributed brainpower, distributed energy, distributed capacity and distributed knowledge.
Yeah, obviously that's the way to go.
microelly2 wrote:The quality of this community is a big miracle never seen before.
I noticed before even being part of it.
saso wrote:
kandelabr wrote:Thanks for replies. I'm actually pretty suprised everything is working so good without a boss (looks like anarchy could work after all :) )...
We do have a more or less common goal, even if our paths sometimes are a bit different... Pa dobrodošel ;)
Haha, živjo :)
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sgrogan
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Re: Development overview

Post by sgrogan »

abdullah wrote:This community does not have that limitation, because it is simply distributed. Distributed brainpower, distributed energy, distributed capacity and distributed knowledge.
Great abdullah! I think you have put in words what I think.
"fight the good fight"
abdullah
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Re: Development overview

Post by abdullah »

sgrogan wrote:abdullah wrote:
This community does not have <del>that</del> limitation, because it is simply distributed. Distributed brainpower, distributed energy, distributed capacity and distributed knowledge.
Well, it does have limitations:

Werner and Yorik have a, though big still limited capacity to merge pull requests :lol:
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sgrogan
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Re: Development overview

Post by sgrogan »

abdullah wrote:Well, it does have limitations:
Only time :)
abdullah wrote:Werner and Yorik have a, though big still limited capacity to merge pull requests :lol:
There is little doubt about their importance to the project. For, me at least, the beauty is they lead without directing.
So kandelabr, what do you have in mind??
"fight the good fight"
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kandelabr
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Re: Development overview

Post by kandelabr »

I'm probably most worried about consistency.

For instance, Part workbench. To "Assign sketch to face" a dialog pops up. For sweep/loft and similar one must select a sketch from a list and a wire from the model. For union/difference etc. one must select from two lists or sometimes from model view.

I found a thread on bezier curves (which I'm very excited about) but the solution with circles as control points and weights doesn't look like a good one to me. The use must 'know' that there is another use of 'circle' and that's making the program more difficult to use. I'd rather add the 'control point' type of sketch entity than to use circles (which looks like a workaround to me). More workarounds mean greater mess both in code and in user experience.

I used Solidworks in the university and now I work for a company that's using Pro/Engineer. I'd call Solidworks a consistently designed program. Once you get to know the few basic rules all features, even the ones you haven't used yet become fairly self-explanatory.
Now Pro/Engineer is a different story. Popups, dialogs, lists are popping up at random places requiring obvious things... It's a disaster.

While the community obviously does its work very well, every programmer has his/her own idea of how a specific feature should be designed...

Do you know what I'm trying to say?
ickby
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Re: Development overview

Post by ickby »

Do you know what I'm trying to say?
Yes. But that is something you need to live with here at FreeCAD. So many people have different ideas of how things should work and how they like to model that there is no way to achieve a perfect consitency. Also the amount of work needed to achieve such a thing is trameandous, hence starting with such an endeavor will never be compelted by a single person and the next one stepping in does it differently again.

For modeling we tried with PartDesign to make a more intuitive and streamlined workflow, and I try to keep an eye on consitency regarding modeling technique and UI in this workbench. But as noted this is so much work that PD with all the 0.17 updates is still messy. If you like to have a impact there I can definitely need a hand :)

In generel there seems to evolve a consensus that there should be two modeling techniques in parallel, with the Part workbench providing more primitive tools and a CSG workflow and PartDesign with a more high level but hence also more restricted toolset and workflow.
triplus
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Re: Development overview

Post by triplus »

kandelabr wrote:I found a thread on bezier curves (which I'm very excited about) but the solution with circles as control points and weights doesn't look like a good one to me. The use must 'know' that there is another use of 'circle' and that's making the program more difficult to use. I'd rather add the 'control point' type of sketch entity than to use circles (which looks like a workaround to me). More workarounds mean greater mess both in code and in user experience.
If you would use point instead of a circle user would still need to know there is another use of point. And with point you wouldn't be able to control the weights.

Yes exactly those circles are not there just for visual representation. :)
triplus
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Re: Development overview

Post by triplus »

And here is another approach on how you could control spline weights. Compared to the spline circles we use in FreeCAD Sketcher ATM:

http://www.core77.com/posts/55368/When- ... al-Objects

;)
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kandelabr
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Re: Development overview

Post by kandelabr »

I just used the poor Bezier as an illustration. I read that a sketch entity can only have 3 defining objects and that's not enough for a bezier curve. I just wanted to say that maybe it would be better to modify the core (i don't know if that's even possible) to allow more objects (a weighted point maybe?) rather than abuse circles, that's just the thing if I was the one writing this I would ask a few fellow programmers. I haven't even tested the feature yet so it's probably just OK, i didn't have any plans for interfering with existing work.

Anyway, at the moment I'm busy doing other things, I'm planning hacking freecad in the future.

Thanks for your help (so far) :)
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bernd
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Re: Development overview

Post by bernd »

[*]Who decides what other modules should be included and how they should be treated? Specifically, there's the FEM workbench that requires separate Calculix install. Why Calculix and not something else? For instance, If one decided to make a fluid analysis workbench with OpenFOAM, how should that look likes!
The developer who does the work decides. In the regard off OpenFoam https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=17322

btw: ... Chuchichäschtli :mrgreen:

Ahh, in addition to CalculiX FEM supports Z88 and there is some development going on for elmer and fenics. I'm recently discovered opensees.
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