Future of FreeCAD/Croquet

I have been working on porting freeCAD to Croquet for about 15 months now. A lot has been done and the base of the porting can be evidently seen and used in the current releases but this is just the tip of the iceberg of a somewhat adventurous career pursuit I have chosen. I have chosen to dedicate my first few months since graduating into developing FreeCAD/Croquet rather than joining the corporate world.
If all goes well and my mentor is able to secure funding for our project, a lot of features will be continually be developed and added into it.

Up till this point of writing, FreeCAD/Croquet is being developed in Cobalt and is able to draw basic solids and do simulation. Future plans will include doing Boolean operations for the solids. This means that we will be able to add and subtract solid shapes to and from one another. It will definitely be a great feature since we are aiming to develop FreeCAD/Croquet into a full fledged CAD system.

Other than that, I plan to complete the motion simulator in the near future so that it is useable like freeCAD with the added advantage of being in a collaborative virtual environment. Engineers and educators alike will be able to use it for work or educational purposes. All these will be free to the public too and anyone can download and use FreeCAD/Croquet.

We have generated quite a lot of interest among fellow enthusiast and our next project should be to create an importer for Google SketchUP models. This will allow users to import millions of models available in Google’s own 3D warehouse for use in FreeCAD/Croquet or even in Cobalt itself. If we manage to complete this, it will draw more attention from other communities into the work we are doing, into Croquet and into Smalltalk. It should be a boost for the Squeak and other Smalltalk communities alike.

Besides that, I hope to be able to put FreeCAD/Croquet online as a virtual world with accessible links to the public. Anyone can connect into it and each player would have their own avatar and virtual space allocated. This way, we will be able to achieve one of our goals which is to have FreeCAD/Croquet be used as a content creator to create objects in the virtual world.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have been directly or indirectly involve in making this project a success. It would be great if more people could help with the testing and debugging as it will definitely speed things up and help make FreeCAD/Croquet more user friendly. I will continue to put my heart into making all the plans work out nicely and hopefully, we will be able to see a full fledge CAD system in a virtual world very soon.