next »

[colinl]

Hi
I have downloaded the free trial version of Cycas and am favourably impressed.  I notice however that the last release was July 2006.  Is there on-going development work?  I do not want to buy a full license only to find that the product becomes obsolete.
Thanks
Colin

[kasper]

As far as I know Cycas will definetely be continued. I expect that the developpers will let you know as soon as they read your question. Few weeks ago I got a message that they were viewing future requests for development. So I wish you fun and nice work going on with Cycas. From my own experience I can tell you its worth going on!

Regards, Kasper

[colinl]

The fact that none of the developers have responded to this does not fill me with confidence.

[W.Weidner]

Hi Colin!

...and thanks to Kasper for stepping in :-)

Development of CYCAS was always slow and unsteady and we understand that this is a kind of torture for our users. Sorry about :-/

However, development is not stopped and is not about to stop.

I really can´t imagine anything that could force Anja and me to quit CYCAS. Not because it makes us rich (we both have other jobs to do to make a living) but because of the pure fun and pleasure in developing and getting feedback from loyal users. :-)


About the current development:

The next release (in Q1/2008) will update import and export  functions:

- PDF compression
- SVG cleanup (and better Inkscape integration)
- Postscript (updated printing and other postscript related exports)
- 3D studio export
- DXF fixes

A second focus lies on a new core implementation of 3D polygon handling and triangulation. It will improve DXF 3D exports and allows to introduce 3DS export. Once this implementation is robust and fast we will use it to implement real 3D boolean set operations (the most important feature not supported by the current geometry core).

Third: fixes for installation and compatibility problems for the latest wave of Linux distributions and Vista. This is important but very annoying and eats up a lot of time.

Also we will react on some user suggestions we collected during the last year.


About future development (a rough outline of our plannings):

1.) Decision about and implementaition of a new GUI.
The current GTK-1 GUI is fast and responsive and has all the features we need for CYCAS. Therefore we never did a transition to the much more bloated GTK2. But now we need to find a new GUI toolkit solution for two reasons:

- More and more compatibility problems with GTK1.
- Missing or insufficient support for Mac OS X and Windows.

There are two candidates: QT (which I don´t like) and wxWidgets.


2.) Implementation of a new desing principle which covers all architectural drawing elements (sorry to be so cloudy..). This is a tricky one and will result in a more or less complete rewrite of  the core. But it´s worth it :-)


3.) A general plug-in approach for controlling external renderers. We simply want to support more renderers than POV-Ray to give choice to the users.


4.) LUA scripting support in every corner of the program to allow all kinds of extensions written by users.



Hope I could dispel your doubts...

Cheers,
Wolfgang

[spor]

Hi Wolfgang,

I certainly have no thoughts. I just like Cycas and remain using it!

This seems very good to me. I wish you good luck with the rewriting and i´m really happy with this new developments you describe. Specially the .svg / inkscape possibilities.

Regards, Kasper

[colinl]

Hi Wolfgang

Thanks for the information, I am much encouraged by your plans.

I have not used Qt or wxWidgets (I am a retired s/w engineer) but the little I do know would cause me to lean towards wxWidgets.  I believe that Qt is not fully open source which could give problems on the free version (I think this is the reason QCad community edition is not availble on windows), though I may have my facts wrong here.

I like the idea of allowing LUA scripting for extensions.

If you do this mostly for the fun and satisfaction rather than the money, have you thought of going open source?  There is nothing available open source anything like as good as Cycas, if you got a few more developers onboard you could push the development forward much more rapidly.  I would be interested in contributing myself.

Regards
Colin

[steve]

Thanks for that Wolfgang

I like the idea of these developments...especially the bits about a new core implementation of 3D polygon handling and triangulation and real 3D boolean set operations

I do a lot of general 3d modelling and any improvements would be welcome.
I also look forward to improved DXF 3D exports and 3DS export. Would this include perhaps material exports with dxf files?

Anyway it´s always a pleasure to use Cycas and I often appreciate the little features and the thought that has gone into it. Thanks to you both.

Steve

[nikoola]

I vote for gtk 2 with python script system.
Gtk 2 is now very mature, robust, stabile and fast.
The transition from gtk 1 to gtk 2 is good documented, and should be not so hard.
I would be interested in contributing myself.
I vote for Open Source!

Good work! Thanks for this app!

[acfrese]

... in order to complete this topic - for the moment - we released CYCAS 3.9 (February 2008) offering these new features:

http://www.cycas.de/news.php?s=en

[steve]

This is just to thank Wolfgang and Anja for their incredible hard work to give us the excellent new features and fixes in Cycas 3.9:

the new hidden line renderer is so good
the boolean functions become more and more useful
the improved paste in 3D is flawless
the direct movement of dimension figures is so easy now
the new camera set up facility makes rendering so much quicker
3DS export very useful
and the others

Cycas has become a formidable architectural tool!