Boolean Operations

Today's note is going to be quick.  Just two things...

First, on Wednesday Dan pushed out a Windows binary.  This is something that a large number of people have been asking for.  Well, he posted the binary and announced it and we haven't heard a thing since.  Has anyone tried it?  Please give us some feedback and let us know if it is working for you.

Second, I am staring in earnest on the Boolean operations code.  It is very interesting, but don't let anyone ever tell you that boundary classification and boolean operations are trivial.  Wow!  I am diving deep into the literature, but wow!  This is going to be a fun adventure.

Here are a couple of the key references I am working through:

• "Set Membership Classification: A Unified Approach to Geometric Intersection Problems" by R.B. Tilove
• "Boolean Operations in Solid Modeling: Boundary Evaluation and Merging Algorithms" by A. Requicha and H. Voelcker
• "An Introduction to Solid Modeling" by M. Mantyla

There are a bunch more, but this is where I am starting.  You might start to see some code appear in the topology_* files, but I am focusing on Slice and Union for now.

Again, please let us know how the Windows version is working for you.

Cheers,

   Graham

wxWidgets Wildcat.exe

I have added a zip file for Windows. It has Wildcat.exe, various dlls, and some picture files for the toolbar buttons. I don't know how to make an installer, so read the text file that gives you some extra instructions.

Scripting Support

On the Wildcat support forum we recently got a request to add support for the Lua scripting langauge.  If you have used Wildcat you know that currently no scripting languages are supported.  This is more an issue of having higher priorities than a lack of desire.  I am focused on getting the core modeling kernel up and running and Dan is working hard on the wx port and his own work.

I must admit that I have little background in scripting languages and have never embedded an scripting engine into any of my projects.  I fully understand the value of this and look forward to adding support in Wildcat.

To me the two crucial questions are:

1. What scripting languages make sense to support?  There are so many possible languages out there that we can't possibly support them all.  Which ones do you all want?
2. How can we make supporting a large set of scripting languages as easy as possible within the kernel?  I want to make it simple and straightforward to add support for a new language if someone want it.

The Lua requester has asked if we have object model documentation of Wildcat.  The simple answer is "No."  But, I have created a Doxygen configuration file that will generate a lot of very nice documentation automatically.  You can find this file in the source tree at "truck\Documentation\Developer\Doxyfile".  You may have to slightly edit some of the paths to account for your directory structure, but with this you can easily get object models and nice code docs.

Please let me know what else you need in order to try to add scripting to Wildcat.  I am more than happy to add in a Cocoa "script" window etc.  I am we can convince Dan to do this on WX also.

Cheers,

   Graham