> DELFTship is the commercial successor, but it's daunting
Author of DELFTship is an author of original opensource FREE!ship in Delphi. But after FREE!ship v2.60 project was abandoned on SourceForge.[0]
Then FREE!ship was forked and extended into FREE!ship Plus[1] by Associate Prof. Victor Timoshenko[2] (National Univerisity of Shipbuilding, Mykolaiv, Ukraine). FREE!ship Plus v3.50 was the last release of extended fork in Delphi, and it also got a lot of closed source freeware plugins.[3]
Since 2015 FREE!ship Plus was forked into FreeShip Plus in Lazarus by Mark Malakanov, initially it was planned as a port for Linux[4]. Project is active on GitHub.
Also, there was the ShipCAD — a try by Greg Green to rewrite original FREE!ship to C++/Qt, but it was unfinished and abandoned.[5]
yes, I was doing a lot of research in this are 18 or so months ago and I stumbled on it and downloaded it.
I don’t have windows so I haven’t done anything with it yet. My memory is that it is very early lofting software and has a reputation for being a close analog to the actual process.
I have strange CAD ideas that are closer to lofting than using a mouse. My intention was to look through the source to find the “engine” and work around that.
Hm, source (and binary) uploaded to GitHub this week, but not by original developer.[0] Code last touched on February 18, 2011.[1] On Softpedia there are its screenshots.[2]
> I don’t have windows so I haven’t done anything with it yet.
Use Wine to launch Windows sotware under Linux.[3]
But, as for me, FREE!ship is the better and more advanced than Hullform.
I haven't done anything other than download the source from somewhere.
I'm still getting other things in place before I need to look into running the software.
I will probably try to do a new build. Per the Github suggestions.
I need to start at a pretty raw level. I think Freeship might be too evolved for me. I definitely want to work with parametrics and I can't remember if hullform is parametric.
I have found the Boatdesign.net community pretty unhelpful, excepting a few members.
The best part about Delftship is the library of hulls one can just grab a starting shell from and continue working on it in some other modeling software that isn't a complete pain to work with :P
The site was in Russian and English, but it was a site of Ukrainian maintainer of FREE!ship Plus, see details and link to page in English in my previous comment.[0]
I just finished building two small boats (1 sheet of plywood each, plus odds and ends) with my preteen sons using a VERY simple plan. Only 3-4 hours of work, plus drying time. I'll check this out when we're ready to upgrade.
Pascal was the systems language that I cut my teeth in when I was a mere thirteen year old struggling to wrap my head around the intricacies of C/C++. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart and I always get a fuzzy feeling seeing real applications built in it.
Similar for me, Delphi 2.0/3.0 was the first time I built something where I thought that looks like normal software. (Getting a hello world running in C++ at the time seemed like a menial task.)
If you're looking for community, see the boatdesign.net forums: https://www.boatdesign.net/forums/boat-design/ or r/boatbuilding.
DELFTship is the commercial successor, but it's daunting: https://www.delftship.net/