Hello all, As there are various near-term and mid/long-term efforts all underway in parallel right now, I wanted to at least describe what I see as being the path forward and to share some thoughts with regards to the three main GUI development efforts. Those three efforts are briefly described as follows:
* MGED - everyone knows it, it's the bread and butter heart of BRL-CAD. * Archer - a sort of an "MGED 2.0" interface that is effectively a comprehensive refactoring and cleanup. * "new GUI" efforts - has various names including SS, iBME, and G3D (none of which really matter at this point). First off, "MGED" as a _project_ and as a name for BRL-CAD's modeler is not going away any time soon. That said, we are migrating towards a radically revamped user interface for it. The LIBGED refactoring was the main way to extract a lot of functionality out of MGED so that it could be cleaned up and utilized in a better GUI. For all intensive purposes, Archer is also a comprehensive refactoring and cleanup of MGED's GUI capabilities. MGED will continue to get minor updates over the next year, but most of the work is focused on refactoring the code so that it can be utilized by Archer and the new GUI. Archer and MGED will merge in the short-term. The result will probably still be called 'MGED' though the code will be some hybrid of the two. Once we can validate most of MGED's core functionality, bindings, features, and behaviors are available in Archer, we can "flip the switch" and make a release update with that new interface. Some work has gone into a testing harness already, but much more is still needed. I'm aiming to have a beta release of this MGED+Archer hybrid sometime this year. In parallel to all of that is the work on the "new GUI". This is our long-term focus. The new GUI is going to take a whole lot longer to even get up to speed with what Archer presently does, even more to take over as the main editor. When the time comes, though, it will probably become a single unified 'BRL-CAD' application (and be named as such). We should have a demo visualization and command interface this year with a lot more momentum gained in 2010. Unlike Archer, which is pretty much able to step straight into MGED's shoes, I see the new GUI starting off with high-level abilities to visualize and manage data (akin to Adobe Bridge or Siemens' Teamcenter) . You import your .g files and are able to browse around and organize geometry. The system manages that data for you as a black box (similar to iTunes, iPhoto, or even web browser caches). As the plugin-nature of the system comes on-line, we can work on adding in conversion, rendering, and then editing support in addition to the on-going usability work. Getting the usability crisp is going to take priority over 'getting things working' and features. This all will be happening concurrently and independent of the MGED+Archer merge. So there you have it. Feel free to comment and discuss or just let it soak in. This is all in accordance with the other priorities going on in parallel (see http://brlcad.org/BRL-CAD_Priorities.png for more detail), but the age-old plan does seem to finally be coming together. Cheers! Sean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ BRL-CAD Developer mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brlcad-devel
