Kunda1 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 9:40 pm
Olav wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:05 pm
I hope he reads this. Thank you, Abdullah, I'm honestly impressed. FreeCAD is just getting better and better.
Thanks Olav
Kunda made sure I read it (Thanks Kunda).
It is something I had in my list for years. However, many times a lot of things have to come together to find the right solution. Funnily, the solution was right in front of me, but I was looking for a different solution. For years I tried to reuse the matrix decomposition used for detecting conflicting/redundant constraints for this detection. I partially succeeded via that route, with a special form of that decomposition that was slow, but implementing it like today would make FreeCAD less responsive specially with big sketches (that is how the hyperlink on the number of DoFs was born). I posted in several other forums, but nobody seemed to know how to solve that problem (or it was impossible to solve it). This until I realised that I could run two separate matrix decompositions, one for constraints and another one for geometry. I could even run them in different threads making use of two cores of the CPU. This was an enlightenment moment.
Then things need to come together. A new mechanism born to solve a totally different problem (uncouple workbenches and help integration of a fork) turned out to be perfect for conveying geometry information to colour the sketch. I got fed up of the pole weights in "mm" units, and implemented a new way. This was important because implementing this mechanism led me to a problem with the poles of B-Splines while dragging, which could only be reasonable solved with enhanced solver information, which led me to work on the matrix decompositions I mention above. These enhanced solver information, then allowed me to improve the Block constraint yesterday (you will have to wait some days or compile master for that). Basically, several seemly unrelated features came together nicely.
There are two things left to say. First, nothing of this would have come without you. You are an amazing community. We all are. Nothing would have come without Werner hunting bugs and fixing my memory leaks in the background. Nothing would have come without the continuous words of encouragement from users that participate in development discussion and that contribute with their ideas to development. Nothing would have come without the perseverance of forum moderators that ping me here and there when there are bugs to fix. But more importantly nothing would have come if it weren't because I once discovered FreeCAD, posted in the help forum and the way I was treated there made me simply want to stay. Thanks for being there for me.
Second, nothing comes for free. I might have introduced between 1 and 2 trillion bugs and crashes with the commits of the last days. So, please use FreeCAD and hunt them for me, so that we get them fixed before release
