New developer questions

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,
I am looking at developing a third party tool for U.S. residential floor design. The floors will be made up of engineered floor members.

My questions are:
1. How is the performance of ArchiCAD with third party tools? The current tool we use sometimes chokes on large projects.
2. Can you add more smart objects to the drawing specific to your application that are not in the ArchiCAD object pool?
3. How hard is the API and what are the support options other than this forum? I am fairly comfortable with the C++ development and have 10+ years of programming experience.

Thank you.

[TomWaltz]

ajayk wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am looking at developing a third party tool for U.S. residential floor design. The floors will be made up of engineered floor members.

My questions are:
1. How is the performance of ArchiCAD with third party tools? The current tool we use sometimes chokes on large projects.
2. Can you add more smart objects to the drawing specific to your application that are not in the ArchiCAD object pool?
3. How hard is the API and what are the support options other than this forum? I am fairly comfortable with the C++ development and have 10+ years of programming experience.

Thank you.

1) The performance depends on a lot of factors, like how complex the addon is and how large the file you are dealing with is (no surprises there).
2) If you look at things like Stairmaker or the CADImage tools, most add-ons deal with objects in some way. Archicad's GDL language for making objects is completely separate from the API, but add-ons using the API can create objects on the fly.
3) So so. It's a mostly C with a few newer parts in C++. The hardest part is learning your way around Archicad enough to know what the different API functions are actually doing. There is some kind of paid support available, but I've never looked at it.

[Anonymous]

ajayk wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am looking at developing a third party tool for U.S. residential floor design. The floors will be made up of engineered floor members...

ajayk,
This is a long overdue tool...glad to see you considering it. Just curious, are you developing this for internal use where you work or do you plan to make it available to the general public?

You mentioned that you current tool "chokes on large projects"...what are you using?

I've spent some time developing parameteric floor framing objects for my personal use but have really never carried them very far - at least they're more intelligent than individiual joists that ship as standard library parts...I'm not a programmer so I've never considered developing them as an add-on.

Please PM me with your contact info...I would love to discuss this with you.

Thanks,
Dan Kunschik

[TomWaltz]

I'm working on a 100% GDL system that allows for points to be inserted into a Polygon (sim to the Pet Palette on Fills), then calculates the spacing of the joists within. Haven't figured out how I'm going to do holes yet, but I have the outline control finished, which I thought was pretty hard to pull off.

[Akos Somorjai]

TomWaltz wrote:
I'm working on a 100% GDL system that allows for points to be inserted into a Polygon (sim to the Pet Palette on Fills), then calculates the spacing of the joists within. Haven't figured out how I'm going to do holes yet, but I have the outline control finished, which I thought was pretty hard to pull off.

Just curious... why GDL? The API has the functionality you need, I think (well, I hope -- pet palette, polygon geometry and editing, custom feedback.

BR,

Akos

[TomWaltz]

Akos wrote:

TomWaltz wrote:
I'm working on a 100% GDL system that allows for points to be inserted into a Polygon (sim to the Pet Palette on Fills), then calculates the spacing of the joists within. Haven't figured out how I'm going to do holes yet, but I have the outline control finished, which I thought was pretty hard to pull off.

Just curious... why GDL? The API has the functionality you need, I think (well, I hope -- pet palette, polygon geometry and editing, custom feedback.

It does, but I like the idea of making something self-contained so it's not reliant on an Add-on for its functionality and this is something completely object-driven.

I actually kind of have it working but have been too busy to really spend any time on it.