[Haskell-cafe] ANN: mecha-0.0.0

A few months ago, I started toying with a few alternative pump designs to power our hydraulic hybrids. After not being able to secure a ProE license, I searched for a free solid modeler to sketch out a few ideas. To my surprise, their are practically no open source 3D CAD packages available. So I created Mecha, DSL for constructive solid modeling. Mecha's geometry is based on octrees, which makes it easy to perform set operations on solids, as well as volumetric calculations such as center-of-mass, moments of inertia, and of course, total volume. Drawbacks of octrees include consuming a lot of memory and the loss of some surface information. To address the later, Mecha carries forward surface points and normals to the leaf nodes of the octree to assist in rendering, such that solids don't look like they're made from a bunch of LEGOS. Note this is a very early release. The only thing Mecha can do at the moment is draw a pretty blue ball -- well it can also zoom and pan on a pretty blue ball (mouse wheel). Establishing a primitive API and building a primitive library must be finished before Mecha an do anything useful. Any comments and suggestions are welcome. http://tomahawkins.org/