KernelCAD 5.0

[nickz]

Dear all
We have released a public beta of KC v5.0. http://www.dynoinsight.com/ProDown.htm It was quite an effort. The change KC internally underwent is much greater than we foreseen in the start.

The aim was to overhaul rendering system targeting top runtime performance. After long discussions and research we have decided to change from OpenGL as the base rendering library to Microsoft's DirectX

Moreover to do this on a higher level we have decided to go with a third party rendering engine. After more of extensive research we went with Ogre http://www.ogre3d.org/. It is a very popular engine used both for 3D applications and games. So theoretically you can develop games with KC now . Ogre is an open source. So it is possible to recompile the relevant dlls and do any customisation. We will post more information and hopefully there will be samples for that a bit later

We took an opportunity and also changed internal architecture of KC to make it more sophisticated and modular. This should not affect applications as interface remains the same and everything, including runtime behaviour, is backward compatible with previous versions. Benefits of this should be obvious going ahead. One feature will be possible using this is sharing of a model by several KC components to behave as several views of the same model

We have also isolated the rendering engine from the rest of KC to make it modular. So in case there something better than Ogre appears for our purpose we can change it much easier. We have also left the door open to OpenGL vs DirectX choice. One of advantages of Ogre is that it can dynamically change rendering system on start-up

In addition to faster rendering there is also heaps of functionality in Ogre which can be exposed quickly. It includes shadows, perspective projection, particle systems, various effects like fire and fog, etc. Let us know what you need, guys.

Core of KC is working, but there are still some testing to do. Some features like symmetries, textures, transparency are still not attended to. Most of them will be coming pretty soon. Modelling Studio and 3DBugger are coming a bit later too. We intend to post frequent updates in the following weeks

Cheers
Nick

[nickz]

The update 3982 of KernelCAD 5.0 posted on 16th of August is a next stage beta. It is safe to do development and it is close to production quality
There are some features which will be available little later in v5.0 and some features (64 bit edition and may be something else to be decided in the next few weeks) will be pushed to v5.1. We hope to make a quick v5.1 by the end of the year

[nickz]

The stable release of KernelCAD 5.0 is out: http://www.dynoinsight.com/ProDown.htm
There are some features which will be available little later in updates of v5.0 and some features (64 bit edition and 3D Debugger among them) will be available in v5.1. We hope to make a quick v5.1 in few months time. Install both v4.4 and v5.0 to use 3D Debugger and Modeling Studio