Paper Modeller 04 with unclear goals

Progress is slow and doubts arose.

The main causes of doubts is the serious lack of knowledge and the unclear goals of the whole "project".


My former tool programming projects had clear goals: to make something useful for me and for a very certain, special task where an unfinished but working application is enough. Those goals were achieved pretty damn well in my opinion. I could make tools (the "DNC Editor" for example) that speeded up and facilitated work by orders of magnitude. They weren't finished, they had bugs, sometimes they crashed, they worked only on the target computer but that was enough.


This "project" has no clear goals.
There can be two main goals: making something useful for special tasks and a certain group like tools for game development in some cases, or making an application that's useful for the public.

• useful for special tasks and a certain group: the problem with this goal that this tool would not be so useful for me or for a certain group. I will not make paper models, at least not in the near future (near <= 5 years) and I don't know any certain "groups" that would do so.
• useful for the public: the problem with this goal is that it requires a finished, polished product, and I simply do not have the knowledge to produce one. It's much harder (in my opinion) to produce a good tool for the public than a game. Just think about the GUI (maybe that's the most important thing to get right).
  And unfortunately I don't have the drive to do what it takes to produce a finished tool: to learn. I think I'd need at very least one year of intensive learning, for which I don't have the time, the mood etc [size="1"](I'm a mechanical engineer, and 8 hours per day of brainwork is just enough for me).
  So, the whole project pretty much hangs in the void with a minor goal: to have some fun. But honestly, digging myself into MSDN, crying over my total lack of knowledge about memory management, etc is NOT that fun.
  
  The fun is in the algorithms, the GUI layout and input/selection/edit features etc. Maybe a more suitable area would be the design for me and it would be better to be part of a team.
  
  
  
  Anyhoo, about the progress of Paper Modeller:
  
  I managed to fix the smoothing algorithm I mentioned in my previous entry: smoothing non-continuous surfaces. That's was a pretty hard task, but I also managed to "optimize" the algorithm while at it, so despite the more calculation needed for handling non-continuous surfaces, the algorithm is twice as fast in average. I even made a test mesh for it: screenie
  
  
  I made a basic, context dependent GUI, which is (by chance) very similar to 3ds Max's right side toolbar. I have lots of glitches with the GUI, it will be a lot of work to get it right (programming and "user experience"-wise). But at least I can move on and I don't have to shit around with ""hotkey"" input.
  
  Reimplemented selection and added some new features. I think my "biggest strength" is the ability to introduce useful features (if it is an ability at all...), so in the end, I think I have some pretty useful selection stuff (maybe more useful than Max's).
  
  Implemented "sheet selection", so different sheets (where the unfolded geometry will be put) can be selected for display and for editing. It's much like the upside down tabs in AutoCAD like software than 3ds Max's multi-viewport layout.
  The main problem with it that it's a bit out of place: it's openGL rendered, self implemented stuff, not a win32 widget thing.
  
  
  
  Maybe I'm just being pessimistic.
  
  
  
  That's pretty much it for now, screenies: