All-in-One AEC package

M by Moult on 13 Jan 2021 # +4 votes

I'm a little late to the discussion, but in short, I agree with @Jesusbill and @duncan . There will not be an all-in-one-package. However, through the implementation of open data standards, sharing and reuse of decoupled code and libraries, and lively and active community, there can be an ecosystem of interoperable tools.

In the software world, a single codebase may be actively developed by many people, each using different tools, some editing text, some editing images, some deploying code, etc, yet the entire process works together due to a standardised workflow and methods of exchange. A similar thing can be achieved in the AEC industry. We already develop projects where 5 disciplines use 5 different software and are able to at least do basic federation... although very rudimentary, the seeds are there.

You may be surprised to hear that the BlenderBIM Add-on is actually taking steps to prevent making Blender an all-in-one package. Read more here: https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/issues/1222

J by JanF on 13 Jan 2021, edited 13 Jan 2021 #

I think this is also what Antonio was hinting in his presentation on the weekend - the missing part that should have come with ifc from the beginning.

We already have a file or a database to hold our data, it's ifc. The part we need is a library to enable "native" and effective manipulation of this database, one which is open and platform agnostic. That will allow everyone to truly adopt ifc, build all sorts of new applications around it or just extend existing ones. That is what ifcopenshell and ifc.js are doing.

B by brunopostle on 13 Jan 2021, edited 20 Feb 2021 # +2 votes

@Moult awesome plan. I think holding and updating the IFC in memory is the right strategy, writing to disk will be fast.

A possible future alternative to consider (and I haven't entirely thought this through), is to mmap the IFC file. So when an entity is modified, you simply overwrite these lines with comment strings at the correct offset using the same number of bytes, then the new/replacement entities are appended to the end of the file. This will be ridiculously fast even for multi-gigabyte files, it will also produce clean diff files and efficient IFC storage in git, basically you will be treating IFC as an append-only file format.

Edit by @JanF : split the thread, please continue here: https://community.osarch.org/discussion/454/partial-edits-of-an-ifc-file-without-rewriting-it/p1

M by mrhe on 13 Jan 2021 # +1 votes

I really appreciate all the feedback and various ideas, which have been put forward so far.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with your take on the matter - have a single source of truth file to eliminate import/export losses, while allowing multiple applications to talk to this source in a coordinated (concurrent?) fashion.

My take on the subject was most probably too heavily inspired by the currently fragmented state of dedicated software packages for landscape architects. As described above, we are forced to using multiple tools to accomplish even the simplest tasks. I would certainly welcome having a better alternative for our profession. In this sense, I'd still like to see an All-in-One Landscape Architecture package, seamlessly communicating with other dedicated packages for Architecture, Structure etc.

@Moult, when do you think BlenderBIM will be mature enough to think about building something on top of it for the landscape architects among us? I'd happily contribute to development of such a thing.

M by Moult on 14 Jan 2021, edited 14 Jan 2021 #

@mrhe The next 4 weeks will probably be all spent dealing with the refactoring issue. After that, we should be back to feature creation mode... and there are so many awesome new contributors so the future is bright!

@brunopostle that's a cool trick, but I worry that it'll only work for files. It also should perhaps be implemented in IfcOpenShell directly. Once this partial editing is built, it opens up so many possibilities!

T by taariq456 on 12 Feb 2021, edited 12 Feb 2021 #

Edit by @Moult - potentially spam:

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D by duncan on 19 Feb 2021 # +1 votes

wow, this discussion has strayed off-topic

J by jtm2020hyo on 20 Feb 2021 #

Returning to topic, I would like than all others projects can join FreeCAD and Blender projects, specially Electrical software, If some check what Electrical plan design FOSS appear around 10 all of they have nice features but they fail in their development because they waste more time fixing their GUI and dependencies than adding features. KiCAD and it is a success.