wizzledonker

It does seem a bit of a throwaway statement regarding OCCT - I also work with it every day and, for the most part, it has all the same eccentricities and limitations of any large heritage-listed C++ library. There's a lot it can do!

Have you worked with Open Cascade recently? As someone who works with it every day for developing a CAD application, it would be interesting to know what people see as its limitations. It's the only geometry kernel I've had access to, and it seems like an absolute gift

This was my impression as well. I think people actually feeling burnt out creatively might read this and get a forlorn feeling that what is required is more work, and then go straight back to mindlessly scrolling

I have an AMD 6700xt.

It was laggy in Windows and under X11 on linux, but under Wayland I get 60-80fps and it's very usable.

Not sure what the cause is

EDIT: Under Chromium (compiled from AUR) the performance is roughly the same

I regret the years I spent with Unity

Any non-trivial feature that Unity has where Godot lacks is usually re-implemented by bigger developers anyway. For Indie developers, these features are almost never necessary.

When developing tools, Godot is far superior. Any support guarantee that Unity provides is easily bested by the ability to inspect the Godot source code without signing an NDA. With the changes in Godot 4, developing add-on tools is easier than ever.

The Godot project is well managed, with pull requests being merged in a timely manner without a loss of overall project quality.

The mass exodus to Godot is perfectly timed. Godot 4 just released with many changes and improvements, addressing almost all the usual pain points between the two engines (especially in 3D).

Just because I’m curious, in what respect is Conan a “partial” package manager? Within the constraints of existing C++ projects and the variance of their build systems, I can’t imagine how to do it differently.

In my experience, most of the value of Conan is with creating packages yourself when needed. You can then self-host a Conan remote and have pre-compiled binaries ready development. Having a conan recipes repository with CI that produces binaries for each required build configuration has become a de-facto standard for projects I have worked on

The closest thing we have at the moment is conan[1]. It’s a cross platform package manager that attempts to implement “integrations”, whereby different build systems can consume the packages[2]. This is a big problem with package management in C/C++, there’s no single, standardised build system that most projects use. There isn’t even a standardised compiler! So when hosting your own packages using Conan, often you need to make sure you build your application for three different compilers, for three different platforms. Sometimes (for modern MacOS) also for two different architectures each.

If you control the compiler AND build system you can get away with just one package for most cases. This true for Microsoft’s C/C++ package manager, NuGet[3]

Historically, the convention has been to use the package manager of the underlying system to install packages, as there are so many different build configurations to worry about when packaging the libraries. The other advantage of using the system package manager is that dependencies (shared libraries) that are common can be shared between many applications, saving space.

[1] https://conan.io/

[2] https://docs.conan.io/1/creating_packages/toolchains.html

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/nuget-for-c/

Are there any implications with this for software piracy? IE: Can I run my trial software in a new "Sandbox" every time?

> I notice you say that it's Windows-only, I take that as a challenge

It runs under WINE with no issues

A agree with this 100%, I have used OpenCascade and Parasolid in the past. With the recent OCCT development trajectory, I'd hesitate to recommend one over the other on the geometry kernel alone. Also people often forget OpenCascade includes an entire visualisation module that FreeCAD doesn't even make use of...

My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for professional use. (Although it’s unfortunate that many API entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite impressive.

What’s missing is a compelling user application now, and this is tarnished by the kernels existing reputation. Case in point, shapr (an iOS CAD modelling app) switched away from OpenCASCADE in 2017, before development trajectory really took off [1]

Also, when searching OpenCASCADE in Google, you get hacker news comments like this [2]

[0]https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518

Exactly the same issue I ended with. It might need some modifications. I'll have a dig

That is such an incredibly good idea haha Thanks :)

True! Might give this a go tomorrow. I'm kinda shocked it got as far as it did to be honest

I've managed to get it to build about half way;

1. In linux

2. Install wine 7.5 (other versions may work, this is what I used)

3. Create a 32-bit wineprefix on a *case-insensitive* ext4 drive (https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...)

4. Download MSVC 2.0 (https://winworldpc.com/product/visual-c/2x), extract and install it into the 32-bit wineprefix - Make sure you use `wine32 winecfg` and set the OS to Windows 95

5. Copy the files to C:\3d inside the wineprefix

6. Enter command prompt from wine (`wine32 cmd`)

7. `set include=C:\MSVC20\INC`

8. `.\setvars.bat`

9. `nmake`

Unfortunately wine segfaults for me when compiling one of the BRender files :'(

EDIT: Now I have Bren and Engine building! Studio does not build, reports that it doesn't know how to generate 'C:\3d\kauai\obj\wins\utilglob.obj'. Probably something simple...

You aren't the only one haha, I work with Qt every day and this was my first thought.

This looks great, I love the clean GTK for this user interface. Say what you will about GTK and Gnome... for beginners on an operating system such as Ubuntu, having a consistent application concept is very important.

Curious how this compares to Lutris[1]. I can see it has support for it as a runner, however as far as I can tell it achieves the same thing by maintaining separate wineprefixes.

[1] https://lutris.net/

Felt this as far away as Wagga Wagga, NSW. It's insane how far these things travel, and especially a shock in a place like Australia where Geological activity is so low. We're just not used to this kind of thing

I love the idea of a web browser that integrates more cleanly with the operating system. I use Linux, and can definitely can see this working very well on my DE of choice (gnome)