When will Grasshopper 1.0 be finished? What happens next?

Grasshopper has been in wip-development for over 5 years and we're nearing the 1.0 mark. At some point within the next few months we'll decide that we've written all the features needed to go into beta and we'll stop adding new stuff. At this point the Grasshopper version will be rolled to 1.0 Beta 1 and we'll keep on fixing serious bugs, resulting in Grasshopper 1.0 Beta 2 etc. etc. until the product is stable enough to be treated as a commercially viable product.

This does not mean Grasshopper will no longer be free. Robert McNeel & Associates (who develop and own the copyrights to Grasshopper) haven't decided yet whether or not to sell Grasshopper or whether to keep it as a free plug-in for Rhino customers.

As soon as Grasshopper 1.0 goes into beta, all development (apart from the odd bug-fix) stops and we start typing on Grasshopper 2.0. It will probably be a few months until the first 2.0 WIP version is released but basically the whole process starts over.

What are we looking to accomplish for 1.0 and which things are planned for 2.0 and beyond? The only major feature still missing in 1.0 is the Remote Control Panel. This feature was removed at some point and has been partially rewritten since then. Once it's finished, we consider the 1.0 feature set to be complete.

To be honest we've made very few concrete plans yet concerning 2.0, however it's clear that some things need to be at least seriously considered and researched. Here follows a list in no particular order:

Documentation System. This is one of the things we know we're going to do as we've already started. The Grasshopper help system will need to be rewritten and a lot of help topics need to be typed up. We have a pretty good idea what it is we want to accomplish with the new help and how we're going to go about it.
Vocabulary. Along with new documentation we'll critically analyse the current terminology and vocabulary of Grasshopper. We'll probably come up with glossaries and style sheets. We want to use words that are —at best— self documenting and —at worst— non ambiguous.
SDK and core library cleanup/improvement. Grasshopper was the first large scale product I ever developed and a lot of mistakes were made in the SDK design. A lot of functions and classes have been marked obsolete over time and many operations are not properly bottlenecked. I also want to add a lot more events so it's easier for code to keep close tabs on what's going on at any given moment.
GUI platform. At the moment Grasshopper is pure .NET winforms using GDI+ for all the interface drawing. There are certain performance issues with using large GDI+ surfaces and certain limitations on what we can and cannot draw. We will be investigating other graphics pipelines such as WPF, OpenGL, DirectX, OpenTK and whatever else seems promising.
Multi-threading. It is clear that some components are embarrassingly parallel, and since almost every single laptop and desktop has at least 4 cores these days it would be a shame not to use them. We will investigate what it takes to implement multi-threading as a standard feature.
Large file support. Grasshopper becomes awkward to use when a document contains more than a hundred or so components. We need to both improve the interface to provide methods for layering or grouping sub-algorithms and also add ways to reduce memory and computational overhead.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ángel Linares on May 6, 2013 at 7:50am

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on May 6, 2013 at 12:50pm

Isn't League of Legends free-to-play (aka pay-to-win)? I'm not sure if that business model works well with GH.

"Get a leg up on your co-workers with the Spirit of the Ancients Component (+12 Attack, +5 Defense)"

Because of its reasonable price range it has the best chance of getting in to the hands of students and teachers, which ensures that the next generations will be reliant on it.

I don't think this is true. Autodesk is doing exactly what you describe, to try to lock users to their products by offering the software for free to students and teachers. It's infinitely more expensive for a student to use GH over AutoCAD or Revit.

There was a forum post somewhere where McNeel was thinking about doing the same thing, give away the educational license (and my guess is then increase the price of the commercial license).

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on May 6, 2013 at 1:33pm

"Get a leg up on your co-workers with the Spirit of the Ancients Component (+12 Attack, +5 Defense)"

Cringes... I imagined buying each component panel (Vector, Maths...) as a special Components Pack (buy 3 for the price of 2 just for 99$).

"...by offering the software for free to students and teachers. It's infinitely more expensive for a student to use GH over AutoCAD or Revit."

Congrats, you just divided by 0 :D

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on May 6, 2013 at 1:48pm

you saw what I did there...

Permalink Reply by Craig Long on May 6, 2013 at 12:56pm

Multi-threading would be tremendous!

Permalink Reply by Arie-Willem de Jongh on May 9, 2013 at 4:59pm

David,

One request (don't know if this is the right place to post this, but here goes): Since more and more people are using the Python language including myself, my question is if it would be possible to include the python for grasshopper component eventually as a native component in grasshopper?

Thanks and cheers, I work with a lot of different softwares, but grasshopper still is one of my favorites. Keep up the good work!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on May 10, 2013 at 5:25am