SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives | Hacker News Reader

SteamCAD – 2D CAD designed to draw steam locomotives

github.com

180 pointsapp4soft31 comments

I love how specific yet comprehensive this package is. The manual appears to be lovingly crafted and from what I can tell, well written [1].

I don't know how many people are specifically looking to draw CAD diagrams of steam locomotives, but I absolutely love that this was someone's itch to scratch and they put so much time into this.

[1] https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD....

One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual:

"5.1 What Next?

Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now features of the software.

Well, not quite so. Of course, if the software need some adjustment in the future to work on new operating systems, it will be updated.

[...]

Despite what was written in the section 5.1, we have published a bunch of patches in November 2018. The patch includes several bug fixes, improved precision when snapping to objects and improved handling of paralel curve copies when the distance grows beyond the smallest curve radius."

This seems like a rare example of software that is not abandoned, but is "finished", and will suffer no feature creep. It is a romantic idea, for a piece of software to be conceived for an exact purpose, be programmed until it exactly fulfills that purpose, and then just be... done, a crystal molded to its niche.

I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.

Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.

Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.

While it’s not very common for “utility” software, it’s still the MO for most games. They might get bug fixes or be ported to new platforms, but usually what goes out on release day is intended as “finished”.

I had a coworker with an autistic son who would obsess over trains. He probably would love this.

If you have the contact info of said previous coworker, I would encourage you to contact them and tell them about this software. Small things like that can mean the world to people sometimes :)

It looks like a general purpose 2D CAD though. I don't see anything specific to trains. Looks Interesting nonetheless.

In some sense, I agree with you -- there is nothing about this package that is necessarily specific to trains.

However, this seems more like an art program than a CAD program. All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines. SteamCAD seems like a poor program for developing and exploring designs, but a good program for presenting designs in a particular style.

I found this in the manual (page 23):

"SteamCAD is focused on the presentation output, not for creating an asset for manufacturing. So each SteamCAD work should be more artistic work than engineering drawing."

> All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines.

All 2D CAD software worked like this for a long time. It's "Computer Aided Drafting": a computerized way to do what used to be done with pencil and paper.

Are there any screenshots? I couldn't find them myself.

The sample output is extraordinarily well-crafted.

Sometimes I think I'd love to write a traditional desktop app like this as a side project. I haven't done it for years.

> Are there any screenshots? I couldn't find them myself.

Here is one screenshot from 2018.[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1064140024822853633

So this is just a CAD program that doesn't really have anything special to do with trains? It's just a barebones CAD program or am I missing something?

Is this the most British software ever?

May I submit signaling simulators?

There are a number of options out there... SimSig (https://www.simsig.co.uk/) covers modern, fully electronic systems, and Blockpost (https://blockpostsoftware.co.uk/) covers old-school mechanical lever-frame and bell operations.

Judging by the author's name, the software is Czech.

Polish.

No. A British Flag installer would be

Think, SteamCAD's dev would add it into SteamCAD2[0]

[0] https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD2

That's not very British.

Is it too sardonic to think that it's only a matter of time before Autodesk tries to buy this too?

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk#Corporate_acquisition...

Additional Reference: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sardonic

Given that it's more a program for producing art in that style (as opposed to engineering new trains), they almost certainly won't? Especially since it's open source.

The manual is a great read.

  ponythink funny

Looks interesting but the sample svg image make my Firefox suffers to render it.

> sample svg image make my Firefox suffers to render it

Links2[0] browser render it without any issues.[1]

[0] http://links.twibright.com/

[1] https://i.imgur.com/3UXj3bh.png

Is that pseudo-graphical Links output just raw X or something? Is it a wrapper around a terminal emulator? I also find the "unprecedented visual experience" part on the homepage to be humorous.

I did not even notice the time it spent rendering the image.

And my laptop is far from powerful, it is an old Ryzen 5 2500u from two years ago.

It's quite strange, the problem is more visible when I click directly on the image (https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/Images/26...). Then my browser freeze 2/3 seconds after the image is rendered. So it's probably not the image itself that cause the problem but the GitHub file visualizer.

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