Archimedes: An architecture open CAD / News: Recent posts

I've finally launched the new 0.60.0 version or Archimedes.
It completes the last trim operation that was missing (trimming a semi-line) and adds the extend feature back.
It also fixes a minor bug to the SVG export system.

Fillet is on its way but the team found it a bit harder than planned. We are also working on a build system that will work on a clean check out from the repository.

The next release (0.62.0) is planned in about a month and should include fillet, a few bug solves and the undo of extend. Hope to get some feedback until there!

Hello everyone,
I've finally released a new stable version of Archimedes. 0.58.0 brings a lot of new features and many bug fixes.
This new stable release counts exporting to PDF and SVG and brings Leaders and trimming back to the work environment. Check the change notes for more details on the other features.

Hello,
I've just released a new unstable version which contains several bug fixes. I already detected another few bugs which will be fixed for the next version. It is going to be a stable version so if you could PLEASE test 0.57.3 a log and report any problem (one by one please) you find.

Thanks.

The team is moving towards enabling trim again. Trimming lines should be available and soon a few others will come. The next stable release will be made by Cecilia and the rest of the Grad students team (without me). Please give us any feedback on problems or anything else.

Finally! We got saving and open back into Archimedes. The new RCP version is now starting to be decently usable. It is much more robust on the development side and now also presenting most features of the old version. If we manage to keep this pace, Archimedes might reach a 1.0 version in less than 1 year. Give us your feedback!

We are trying to get back to a decent rythm. Last week, the team added the intersector between an infinite line and another infinite line so grips with those elements should be working.
We also corrected a few things in the Exporter system so you should now be able to save your drawings in the Archimedes file format (XML or ARC).
Finally, the trim system is being re-implemented to work with the new intersection system so the command is back though it does nothing.... read more

After one year without releasing any update, we have finally put together a new version of Archimedes. Contradicting what I previously said, we worked on the RCP version and got the whole intersection to work back again. So all grip features should be working but trim and extend hasn't been enabled yet.
Hopefully in a couple weeks we should have another version with those features.

After almost a full month work, we are releasing a new version of Archimedes. Some nice feature have been added and some bugs corrected. It is still far from 0.17.x that was much more complete but we are moving towards that.
We are missing a lot of feedback about bugs, problems and the most important features to be brought back. This is the last month of the new team and the productivity will probably fall down again in July so, please, help us discover what are the most important feature to be implemented until July.
So far our next month of work involves:
-Saving and opening .arc (our own XML file format)
-Solving four or five bugs founds through the software
-Altering the dimension way to determine the text size
-Adding scale and stretch commands... read more

Well guys,
I've just uploaded yet another version of 0.50.x and this time I think all went right. Please report bugs and errors or dificulties found during the install process and warn me. I will not generate another version of those to download but I will add the fixes so that the next version does not face the same problems.

I've released the OpenGL plugins for all three platforms so that people who had troubles after creating a new drawing, do not have to download another full installer. Just download the corresponding plugin to your platform (if you don't know what is your platform, just download all three plugins) and put them in the 'plugins' folder that is in the Archimedes' install directory.

Ok!
I'm sorry! Version 0.50.0 was completly bugged for Linux. The OpenGL package was not generated during my build and which caused the installer and the zip to be incomplete and useless for Linux users.
As far as I know, Windows and MacOS X users shouldn't have had any problems. If I am wrong, please warn me.
Version 0.50.1 contains corrected installers and zip files.
Meaning that:
All installers now contains a package with basic operations (that they didn't on .0 for some unexplainable reason).
Installers for linux will now create a correct shortcut.
Installers for linux will now add the opengl package required to create a drawing.
Windows users have a mouse wheel bug corrected on .1 which made the zoom not to centralize on mouse's position.
Zip files no longer create a huge folder tree (Users/nitao/Desktop/deploy/win32.win32.x86/Archimedes...) but only deploy on a single Archimedes folder.
I hope never to face those problems again and I ask you please to forgive me about that.

It seams something went wrong with the installers I uploaded. As soon as possible I will try to get another version of those installers tested on empty machines (mines are all vicious regarding Archimedes). I hope to get those updates by tomorrow afternoon.
Please report all the problems you have to me. Send me an email or post about it on the forum please. Sorry about that but all my tests at home worked fine.

After such a long time, the new Archimedes release has been launched. I've jumped a lot of release numbers because this is a major migration so keeping the old number state was a bit unreal.
From now on, everything will continue to work just like before expect we are starting the development of version 0.51.0.
Apart from that:
We decided to release this version because there is a new team working on the project and it has been developed for a college course so they need quick and short iterations to work on, just like at the beginning (and as I would like it to be all the time).... read more

It took me 10 days instead of a week but still, here I am. What have we been doing?
Mainly, we are continuing the migration. The main platform is quite stable but does absolutly nothing. Which means I am not going to release something that will be totally useless to anyone. If you guys disagree, please let me know so that I can reconsider it.
Replaning the future today, I have, once again, defined a deadline to release this new "stable" version of Archimedes: 16/04/2007.
This release will be made just the day I come back from the FISL 8.0 and should be made of something like 70% of the features from the old platform.
The main improvements that may not be available are: Texts (using Truetype fonts), JUnit 4.0 tests (regarding developers only) and MAYBE we have a very slow and inefficient intersection detection system. Our main problem is that we are generalizing it and this means we will have to implement some non linear system solver. Any help regarding that last subject is very welcome considering we have no specialist on the subject in the team.

It has now been almost 3 months since there was a last post on this site.

I am ashamed of it and very sorry but those were some really busy months. The last year's team disapeared since most of them graduated and took some holidays off but never restarted programming. I've been trying to work on the project almost alone but this takes tons of work and therefore a lot of time.

Those were the bad news.... read more

Well, the fact is: We are NOT dead! :)

We gave ourselves a couple weeks vacations on december which were enlarged by our lack of time. We should be restarting to work this week and I'll try to release an unstable version this weekend.

It should, however, take us a few more weeks to release anything stable. We are passing through a major change in our platform.
We are migrating from SWT platform (where we handled all the windows and events and class loading) to an RCP platform (that handles all this to provide extensibility via plugins). This is taking quite some time because it requires that we reorganize and move about 50% of Archimedes.... read more

Well guys,
Last release was 3 weeks ago and yet we're not launching a stable one. 0.17.1 is a new unstable release with very few new features.
The team is facing a serious time problem since the semester is at his end and most of us have to deliver our graduation work the 4th of december so we shouldn't be really active until then.

Hope to see you soon.
Hugo

Hello guys,
Just launched the 0.17.0 version.
Nothing very new in it except for the very powerfull trim for closed element.
It is now much easier to draw a room now and other things whose form is almost polygonal.
Besides that, some behaviour modifications and only one tiny correction on image exporting.
Otherwise, nice features are being implemented but are not yet available. They should only be ready next week.... read more

With 0.16.0, Archimedes comes closer to something that can be called 1.0.
With several corrections and auto save to avoid work loss, this version is a more stable work environment and allows further adjustments after exporting to svg.
Another news is the italian translation done by Davide Presenti, a user.

The next version should bring cotas, fillet with arcs and splines as main news. Besides, several little adjustments or changes and a few corrections.
Please report bugs or/and post feature requests.

The main news about this unstable version is the possibility to save automatically the open drawings as well as the workspace properties.
With it you cannot loose anymore the work done on Archimedes. The open drawing on close time are persisted so that they can be reopen on a new software execution.
Besides the drawings, properties like the mouse size and the other ones are also saved to reduce the user overhead with the software.
Next week will bring the new stable version that should bring a couple more features. Stay tunned!... read more

Just released two sets of files.
Improvements in 0.14.0 launched under 0.14.1. This new stable version has the same features its 0 version had but we added up to date user manuals and corrected a couple nasty bugs.
0.15.0 inherited those features and added a programming week. Some new features and bug corrections can be found there (show the notes and change log).
Enjoy both versions since they are quite better than the previous one.

So here is, after three unstables, Archimedes 0.14.0. New commands, new icons, better usability, some bug fixes, some feature requests. All this, and less than a month has passed.

The new commands include stretching, scaling and rotating elements. The new icons make things easier, although they're not yet deactivated when a command is in progress. To learn about other changes, do read the release notes.... read more

0.13.2 comes with muilti commands for line, fillet and others (they don't end); a bug correction; and a new text creation method (now accepting size).

The unstable release 0.13.1 brings two important new functionalities: rotate and scale. Also, some further work on polyline offset, that should be solving more cases correctly.

With a fast growing system, sometimes the released solutions in stable versions are not remarkable for their coding or architecture.
This time we are talking about a part that had already been criticized previously by the own team: The XML Parser.
This week we focused on the remodeling of this funcionality and also on the re adaptation of the system's tests that were not matching since the last architectural refactor.
Few new features were implemented:
- A simplified offset for the polylines.
- Internal undos to the commands (not yet available in all commands).