[Gmsh] Outline of future development.

[Christophe Geuzaine]

Johan Kieselbach wrote:
> Thanks for a great software, and for a 2004 with rapid development and 
> many useful features. In order to add up to things that one have to look 
> forward to, it would be very interesting if you could just very briefly 
> summarize what is in the pipe for 2005 (or the near future). I think 
> that many gmsh-users would appreciate this info.
> 

Hi Johan - Here's what's in the pipe for the next release (already
implemented, but needs some testing):

- support for discrete surfaces (STL + new "Discrete Surface" command in
.geo files), allowing to import surface triangulations and use them to
generate 3D meshes

- new (Eigenvalues) and enhanced (CutPlane, Cutgrid, CutMap, Evaluate)
plugins, with better user interaction, ability to compute isovolumes in
addition to isosurfaces, and ability to perform operations involving
multiple views (with or without interpolation)

Medium term plans include:

- adding support for arbitrary high order field visualization using
adaptive refinement (mostly implemented; needs testing, "bulletproofing"
and documentation)

- adding support for curved elements in the post-processor

- adding differential operator plugins (Grad, Curl, Div)

Long term and very long term goals include:

- remeshing of discrete surfaces, mixed or not with "normal" surfaces

- optional linking with OpenCascade libraries to import CAD files

For a list of other things we'd like to do/see done, have a look at the
TODO file in the source distribution.

Take care,

Christophe

-- 
Christophe Geuzaine
Applied and Computational Mathematics, Caltech
geuzaine at acm.caltech.edu - http://geuz.org