FreeShip Plus in Lazarus – An open-source software for boat and hull design | Hacker News Reader

FreeShip Plus in Lazarus – An open-source software for boat and hull design

github.com

132 pointsapp4soft20 comments

If you want to see someone go from zero to building out a small plywood boat using FREE!Ship to design the plans, see https://www.armylakeboatco.com/ and their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@armylakeboatco.

If you're looking for community, see the boatdesign.net forums: https://www.boatdesign.net/forums/boat-design/ or r/boatbuilding.

DELFTship is the commercial successor, but it's daunting: https://www.delftship.net/

Chesapeake Light Craft is a great source for supplies and ready to build kits: https://clcboats.com

> DELFTship is the commercial successor, but it's daunting

Author of DELFTship is an author of original opensource FREE!ship in Delphi. But after FREE!ship v2.60 project was abandoned on SourceForge.[0]

Then FREE!ship was forked and extended into FREE!ship Plus[1] by Associate Prof. Victor Timoshenko[2] (National Univerisity of Shipbuilding, Mykolaiv, Ukraine). FREE!ship Plus v3.50 was the last release of extended fork in Delphi, and it also got a lot of closed source freeware plugins.[3]

Since 2015 FREE!ship Plus was forked into FreeShip Plus in Lazarus by Mark Malakanov, initially it was planned as a port for Linux[4]. Project is active on GitHub.

Also, there was the ShipCAD — a try by Greg Green to rewrite original FREE!ship to C++/Qt, but it was unfinished and abandoned.[5]

[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/freeship

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160927052330/http://www.hydrons...

[2] https://linkedin.com/victor-timoshenko-33a053a

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20160927062856/http://www.hydrons...

[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20160822054832/http://hydronship....

[5] https://github.com/gpgreen/ShipCAD

Any change of getting a non-Windows build? I have no idea but I would imagine the % of HN readers that or on MacOS or Linux is high.

Yes, FreeShip Plus in Lazarus already packaged for Linux (see DEB-packages in releases assets).[0]

[0] https://github.com/markmal/freeship-plus-in-lazarus/releases...

Does anyone know of how this compares to Hullform? I have the source for 9.12 that I keep meaning to try to get going.

> I have the source for 9.12

Source code of Hullform?

yes, I was doing a lot of research in this are 18 or so months ago and I stumbled on it and downloaded it.

I don’t have windows so I haven’t done anything with it yet. My memory is that it is very early lofting software and has a reputation for being a close analog to the actual process.

I have strange CAD ideas that are closer to lofting than using a mouse. My intention was to look through the source to find the “engine” and work around that.

> yes

Hm, source (and binary) uploaded to GitHub this week, but not by original developer.[0] Code last touched on February 18, 2011.[1] On Softpedia there are its screenshots.[2]

> I don’t have windows so I haven’t done anything with it yet.

Use Wine to launch Windows sotware under Linux.[3]

But, as for me, FREE!ship is the better and more advanced than Hullform.

[0] https://github.com/jesshaas/hullform

[1] https://github.com/jesshaas/hullform/blob/main/Final%20Relea...

[2] https://www.softpedia.com/get/Science-CAD/Hullform.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

This is from the builders.c file of my source.

I haven't done anything other than download the source from somewhere. I'm still getting other things in place before I need to look into running the software.

I will probably try to do a new build. Per the Github suggestions.

I need to start at a pretty raw level. I think Freeship might be too evolved for me. I definitely want to work with parametrics and I can't remember if hullform is parametric.

I have found the Boatdesign.net community pretty unhelpful, excepting a few members.

https://www.boatdesign.net/attachments/parametric_hull_form_...

I just found this thesis which is also a commercial product.

https://www.polycad.co.uk/downloads/MB_Compit2010.pdf

The best part about Delftship is the library of hulls one can just grab a starting shell from and continue working on it in some other modeling software that isn't a complete pain to work with :P

Sounded like a neat project but seemed light on documentation.

Had to go back to 2015 in the Internet Archive[0] to actually find a copy of the website mentioned.

The site is in Russian but Google Translate seems to do an okay job of bringing it into English[1].

[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20150223174714/http://www.hydron...

[1] - https://web-archive-org.translate.goog/web/20150223174714/ht...

> The site is in Russian

The site was in Russian and English, but it was a site of Ukrainian maintainer of FREE!ship Plus, see details and link to page in English in my previous comment.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36670328#36671965

I found some screenshots of the output of the application here:

https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/freeship-plus-in-lazarus-...

I just finished building two small boats (1 sheet of plywood each, plus odds and ends) with my preteen sons using a VERY simple plan. Only 3-4 hours of work, plus drying time. I'll check this out when we're ready to upgrade.

Pascal was the systems language that I cut my teeth in when I was a mere thirteen year old struggling to wrap my head around the intricacies of C/C++. For that, it'll always have a special place in my heart and I always get a fuzzy feeling seeing real applications built in it.

Similar for me, Delphi 2.0/3.0 was the first time I built something where I thought that looks like normal software. (Getting a hello world running in C++ at the time seemed like a menial task.)

No screenshots. Of course.

Oceangate definitely did not use

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