Bricscad V8
New
As opposed to V7, which was based on the (by now) old OpenDwg libraries, Bricscad V8 is based on the new DwgDirect libraries from the Open Design Alliance. This means that the Bricscad kernel was rewritten from scratch and that all commands had to be reimplemented... V8 is not a regular update, but the next generation of the Bricscad product: less than 30% of V7 legacy code has made it into the new V8.
All toolbar icons have been redesigned.
New Resizable Dockable Properties toolbar replaces old Entity Properties dialogs.
New Resizeable Dockable Command Bar.
New Drawing Explorer, extended with following functionality:
New Dimension Styles manager, replaces old Dimension Settings dialog
New Xref manager
New Raster Image manager using the FreeImage raster engine, supports .bmp, .jpg, .png, .gif and .tiff format
Drawing and Block librarian functionality
New Settings dialog replaces Drawing Settings and Options dialogs, offering a consolidated overview of all system variables and settings, a hard-to-master section of the dwg world.
New DDedit and Enhanced Attribute Editor dialogs.
New UNDO implementation based on the native ODA DwgDirect undo infrastructure.
Unicode: similar to AutoCad 2007, all string processing now is Unicode-based. This implies that the signature of some SDS functions was modified. DWGCODEPAGE now always is equal to SYSCODEPAGE.
DRX offers similar functionality to ARX. Interested developers can contact us to obtain a dedicated SDK.
SDS dlls are now loaded as DRX dlls: the entry point code has been modified similarly as in AutoCad ADS dlls. See sdsMigrate sample code.
The threading model has been simplified, and the number of threads have been reduced to a minimum. SDS applications now run in the main thread, which solves the problem of undesired execution of client SDS code while a response from the main application is expected.
COM: the IntelliCad based COM API is replaced by a new, AutoCad compatible COM API. The application part of the API is contained in axbricscadapp1.dll while the database part is contained in axbricscaddb1.dll. The corresponding type libraries are listed as Bricscad App 1.0 Type Library and Bricscad Db 1.0 Type Library. The VB syntax to create the application object (which is of type AcadApplication) becomes: myAppInstance = CreateObject ("BricscadApp.AcadApplication").
Bricscad switched from using the IntelliCad .vbi VBA file format to the AutoCad .dvb format. Unlike .vbi files, which were linked to their parent dwg file, .dvb files are independent and can be used with no matter which drawing. Similar to the former CommonProjects.vbi, a default.dvb project is loaded on application startup, or created if missing. VBANEW, VBALOAD, VBAMAN commands were added to Tools/Vba menu.
Lisp: a new Lisp engine has been built in, offering stunning performance improvement and extended functionality. VL, VLR, VLA and VLAX functions are supported now.
Autoload.rx replaces icad.sds and contains the list of DRX and SDS applications that are auto-loaded when Bricscad starts up.
On_start_default.lsp and on_doc_load_default.lsp replace icad.lsp and are the Lisp files that are autoloaded at application start and document load. These autoloaded files are managed by the Bricscad application. On_start.lsp and on_doc_load.lsp are the autoloaded lisp files to be created/maintained by users.
Menus and toolbars now natively use the acad .cui (xml) file format
New Customize dialog allowing to modify and create personalized menus, toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. This data is stored in .cui files. The Customize dialog also allows to edit Aliases and Shell Commands, stored in the default.pgp file.
New Image Menu implementation. Image Menu definition and usage has been made compatible with acad. Support was added for Image Menu definitions contained in MNU files when converting the latter to CUI files.
EATTEDIT command was added, it provides enhanced attribute editing. This command replaces DDATTE in the menu and toolbar.
SHADEMODE command was added, it allows to switch between shading modes, e.g. to return from shaded mode to the default mode (2D).
Creation of non rectangular viewports. The MVIEW command has a new option 'Object' to create a viewport boundary from an entity. Supported entity types are polyline, circle, ellipse, region and spline.
Source code of two sample programs for batch plotting was added, one is in LISP and one in VBA.
