Forums > Bricscad (Windows) > Bricsys moving away from intellicad??????

I am concerned after reading the "dissapointment" posts from Steven Meres and Jon Grimshaw. Bricsys, if this is true, why are you moving away from intellicad and what graphics engine will you adopt, or will you write your own CADD engine? Please comment! Enquiring minds want to know.

Is Bricscad moving away from IntelliCAD?? Yes,... and we are in the final stage.
Today Bricsys is still member of the ITC and we still use parts of IntelliCAD. We are supportive to the ITC. The ITC has internal rules about communication and we fully want to respect that now and in the future. So you will not hear from us a bad word about IntelliCAD, the ITC nor any colleague member of the ITC.

But it's time to explain what is going on.
Since V5 we replaced more and more parts of the code by our own code. In 2005 we have licensed substantial parts of our code to the ITC (Ralph Grabowski mentioned it years ago). We hoped that the ITC would take our code as the basis for next versions. Instead the ITC has merged the licensed piece of code into their code stream - a decision we regretted but had to respect. It turned out that this would have large consequences.
Consequently the more we rewrote code the more we went away from the official IntelliCAD code and the more difficult it was for us to merge our code with IntelliCAD code every time there was an upgrade: we grew away from each other you could say.

There is also the ODA (Open Design Alliance) DWG libraries. If we wanted to support compatibility in the future we had to move away from the old libraries and be based on the new DWGdirect libraries, needed for support of UNICODE, DRX, and a ton of other important things. DWGdirect required a rewrite.
Another main issue was that Bricsys strongly believes in Operating System independence: there is LINUX and Mac too. Wine is fine for a while but our users want native software (e.g. see the Bricscad LINUX forum). We want mainly one source code for all versions. This means we could no longer use Mfc classes (from Microsoft) in our code: a major issue for our GUI.

All these issues together left us with no other choice than rewrite the whole platform from scratch and go for our own destiny. Bricscad V8 was the first release of it: not an easy step and we had our dilemma's in the last four years: support an older technology while a team is writing a brand new platform. Older versions, ...V6, V7 have really few to do with V8, V9,... . As some of our users mentioned on this forum, V8 had its problems. We have done our best to get it under control as fast as we could.
Here at Bricsys we are convinced that with V9 we have a hell of a product now. The GUI is based on (WX Widgets Open Source) instead of Mfc classes so the road to LINUX is now open too.

In the mean time we have developed BRX, a layer on top of DRX - the ODA's alternative for ARX from Autodesk. If an application developer wants to port his ARX based application from AutoCAD to a platform that uses the DWGdirect libraries, he can use the DRX SDK from the ODA. The problem however is that (1) this requires modifications to his code and consequently (2) he has to maintain two code streams.
With BRX on top of DRX we offer a code compatible solution: just recompile the code and run the application on Bricscad. I guess many of our users will appreciate this indirectly on the mid and long term, because from V9 on, we will enable a constant growing number of applications, regionally and internationally. Today more than 150 application developers are in the process of evaluating BRX and/or porting their app.

The good thing is that we are close to the end of the rewrite. That is an absolute priority. We expect to finish the job somewhere at the end of this year. When done, we will have much more room for new features and improvements than we had for the last for years as you probably will understand now. So from early 2009 it can only go faster.

We will leave the ITC and - as far as we are concerned - in good understanding we hope. We want them as well to be succesfull.
At Bricsys we concentrate ourselves on our own strength: develop good software, get better and better in supporting the fast growing number of customers, offer transparency in the things we do.
I hope this clears the sky a bit. Thanks for all your support so far. We do our utter best to keep you on our side.

erik

Erik,

Thank you for the reply! The results of your efforts speak for themselves. A job well done I will add. Congratulations and good luck in the future. You will have me as a customer.

Eric,

Thank you for outlining the direction Bricsys is taking with Bricscad and congratulations on the release of V9, I know you all are working very hard on these releases.

I do have a couple of questions I hope you or someone else might be able to answer.

1. In choosing not to use MFC classes in Bricscad, does this mean that BRX will not be supporting the MFC AcUI/AdUi classes?
2. Does Bricsys recommend that 3d party developers use wxWidgets in their DRX/BRX applications instead of MFC?
3. If 2 is yes, would it be possible for Bricsys to give an example of how to use wxWidgets in a DRX application?

Thanks for your time, and keep up the great work.

Erik,

Thank you for taking the time to explain long-term goals for BricsCAD. Personally, I think that Bricsys is heading in the direction. I have tried demos of virtually all of the Intellicad products, yours is vastly superior. If you have accomplished this by contributing more and more of your own code then I think it is time to strike out on your own. Version 9 appears to be a well designed stable program. Two aspects to the program I really like are: first, the ability to integrate specialized third-party add-ons into the program. And secondly, your comments about crossing over to other platforms especially Linux and Mac are fantastic! I have been a Windows user for a long time and have never been pleased with the operating system . I have dabbled with Linux at home with some success, but it's still a little bit outside of the mainstream. I have used Macintosh systems on occasion and are very impressed. However, the line up of software that we use has never been available for Macs. Hopefully this is about to change. Despite some of the grumbling that I see here in the forum I have had nothing but positive experiences from Bricsys. While v.8 may not have been fine-tuned to be perfect, I have always had prompt responses from your team. This is something you virtually never get from Autodesk (I find this especially ironic when you consider the cost of Autodesk products). I congratulate you on the release of v.9 and will continue to embrace BricsCAD in the future.

Keep up the good work.

PS, You are .."heading in the right direction".
been a long day............

We might have guessed that something like this was happening, since the main executable file for version 8 was called "bricscad.exe" instead of "icad.exe" and since all the other Intellicad demos seemed almost identical to each other but different from Bricscad, even from version 7.

I too feel the need to chime in with a hearty nod to Bricsys moving in the direction it is. I especially applaud the movement away from MFC classes, and focussing on the mxWidgets.

We have already migrated all of our servers to Linux, and would like nothing more than to move all of our desktops to Linux as well. If a truly native Linux version is in the works, I for one can't wait to try it. Having to run it through WINE is not a long term solution.

Thank you Erik for this detailed statement....it sheds new light on the early buggy nature of V8, and makes me more confident in your product.