LEDAS Game Jam

Main text and photo by Anton Tarasov, LEDAS jam initiator.

Besides 20 industrial software development projects, LEDAS team organises and supports some informal activities including

- a club of movie lovers (movies only in English),

- a club of books lovers,

- regular table tennis championship of LEDAS, 

- successful participation in annual volleyball championships of Novosibirsk academic campus,

- classes twice a week to improve our conversational English,

- support for the All-Siberian contest on programming, 

- and some others. 

Recently, a new activity arose, a 36-hour game jam (start at 9 a.m. Saturday, finish at 9 p.m. Sunday, some strict rules assumed), aimed to develop video games and probably to master/improve new techniques - of course, along with obvious entertainment. Below you can see a translation of a report on the first game jam posted by LEDAS in a popular Russian social network VK .

Day 1

Randomly selected topic: "Small character, big enemies". The initial plan was to think over the ideas separately however this smoothly resulted in a team brainstorming. 

We generated 16 game ideas:

Participants: 2 teams each of 2 persons + 5 individuals:

During the day, we met couple times in the LEDAS café to have a snack and discuss the jam progress:

Day 1 was rather fruitful; almost everyone already had playable prototypes. One of us, having spent 13 working hours, has completed his jam by the end of Day 1:

Day 2

By the lunch of Day 2, almost everyone began to enrich contents and balance their prototypes:

   

In the evening, after the jam, some of us met to review the developed games:

 And to make the photo:

Final screenshots:

Onshape exceeds expectations

Yesterday morning, Jon Hirschtik honored LEDAS by his recent initiative to give our experts a broad 2-hour demo and discussion of the Onshape system whose beta is expected to be released in a couple of weeks. 

Just after the release we will present our impressions at isicad.ru and isicad.net but so far we are under NDA. However, NDA does not prevent me from saying that Onshape definitely exceeds our expectations. If you are interested in the future of CAD, keep a close eye on Jon’s next generation CAD entering the market. 

Next week, LEDAS CEO participates in the events of Bricsys, SolidWorks, and Dassault

Alexey Ershov, LEDAS  Chief Executive Officer, is going to take part in three conferences:

• ·         Bricsys International Conference 2014, 14 – 15 October, Barcelona,
• ·         16^th SolidWorks Russia Forum, 16 October, Moscow,
• ·         10^th 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2014, 17 October, Moscow.

The trip from the Siberian headquarters of LEDAS to Europe (in particular, to Germany) and to the vendor conferences, is basically aimed at meetings with current and potential customers of LEDAS software development services.

Besides discussing service projects, Alexey will respond to recent requests to demonstrate and comment on a new generation LEDAS technology called LGC (LEDAS Geometry Comparison). Several companies have already become interested in the LGC technology, which has several important advantages over the few known marketable solutions. In particular, it is available as a component easily integrated into any engineering software, it demonstrates much better performance and reliability, and it also be released in a cloud version. The demo version of LGC can be downloaded  from the LEDAS web site.

LEDAS experts are currently working on analysis and specification of perspective new products (some of them – on top of LGC) inspired by the team experience and market demand. Alexey is going to discuss these new specifications with the partners and all those who are interested in diverse cooperation with LEDAS.

Being the top manager of LEDAS and a technological expert, Alexey Ershov is in the same time  known as a writer for the web portal www.isicad.ru / www.isicad.net which is a leading Russian edition in the domain of engineering software. Hopefully, he will find some time to share his impressions from the conferences with the isicad readers.

Today LEDAS released a must-have software component to compare 3D models

LEDAS Geometry Comparison (LGC) makes it easy to compare 3D models and clearly pinpoint all of the differences between them, which are shown as groups of modified faces. LGC maps topological elements of two 3D models and restores their associativity, allowing attributes, parameters, and constraints to be translated from one model to another. Built-in adjustment technology makes it possible for LGC to compare models that even were translated (moved) and rotated with respect to each other.

The software supports an extensible set of open and proprietary 3D part and assembly CAD formats. The cross-platform LGC code runs on 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux, in both traditional and parallel MPI (message passing interface) versions. The LGC application programming interface is tuned for work in the cloud, making the integration of LGC into customers’ cloud-based systems as simple as possible.

See “The Benefits of LGC”, overview, sample models, demo, and more in and through "LEDAS Releases 3D Comparison Technology to the B2B Market. LGCcomponents available now for integration into engineering software":

LEDAS at COFES 2014: Intelligent DXF/DWG, Geometry Comparison, CAM, and The Company’s Key Points

In my previous post I presented Ivan Rykov, LEDAS CTO, a participant of upcoming COFES 2014.   

Today, Ivan is already on his way to Arizona with copies of four booklets, each of them describing 7 certain things related to some, but not all, key domains of the company's projects and skills. 

Want to know about intelligent DWG, advanced components of CAM, or really smart Geometry Comparison? Meet Ivan Rykov at COFES 2014.  

Seven major things you should and can learn about LEDAS at COFES 2014

Upcoming COFES 2014 as well as recently celebrated 15 years since the company foundation, inspired LEDAS   team to formulate what are the most important achievements that build LEDAS reputation and differentiate the company from other software R&D service providers. Seven topics have been identified and described: three related to in-house technologies, three – to big projects with the global market leaders, and one topic describing a project with a CAD community. All mentioned topics are presented in a dedicated new LEDAS booklet prepared for COFES 2014.

Want to know more? Ask LEDAS CTO Ivan Rykov at COFES 2014: April 24-27, 2014, Scottsdale, Arizona, The Scottsdale Plaza Resort. 

See about Ivan Rykov at LEDAS web site. Connect Ivan via LinkedIn or Skype ivanrykov or tweet to @ledasgroup. 

Since 2009, LEDAS representatives participate in COFES, Congress On the Future of Engineering Software. In 2010, together with the COFES/Cyon Research team, LEDAS organized COFES-isicad Forum in Moscow, and then became one of the main contributors of COFES Russia 2013.

ASCON moves towards BIM relying on C3D kernel and A.Bausk

This step of ASCON is not a bombshell. See, for example, how the company CEO Maxim Bogdanov presented the key directions of ASCON’s immediate developments last May:

However, the news that came out on this Friday about ASCON, BIM, C3D kernel, and Alexander Bausk altogether was a kind of a sensation for the Russian CAD market. 

After his excellent simultaneous translation at isicad-COFES-Russia 2010, a series of analytical articles (such as "More or Less Optimistic Update on BIM"), participation in Arizona COFES 2012, moderating BIM-related round tables at AU Russia 2013 and COFES Russia 2013, Alexander Bausk, who has a PhD in structural analysis and is an expert in industrial (nuclear stations) AEC, became one of the most noticeable analysts on Russia & CIS market. To better understand what I mean, see for example @bauskas.

Now a prompt nano-interview with Alexander.        

Is it true that you are now a full-time employee at ASCON?

Yes, it is true. It happened three days ago.

What is your position and what is the main focus of your tasks?

I've got a position of a leading analyst in one of new ambitious ASCON projects that uses ASCON’s modeler C3D. Joining ASCON, I have not changed the key point of my personal interests and work: it is still AEC engineering. My plans to help advance BIM also have not changed and I get an enthusiastic support from my employer. I believe that together we will present some new remarkable AEC and BIM tools. 

As far as I know, until now, you have been living quite far away from St-Petersburg. Do you work with ASCON remotely, over the Internet? 

No. Now I am living in St Petersburg, and my family will move here as soon as the school year is over.

My comment

ASCON has sound competences in MCAD, PLM, AEC, and supporting technologies. All ASCON’s current solutions are very popular in the Russian market, and the company’s ecosystem is likely the most developed in comparison with other vendors operating in Russia. ASCON has very close and efficient links with the Russian industry and is aware of its specifics and everyday needs. It means that although developing and bringing a new BIM product to market is very risky, ASCON has good chances.

Anyway, I believe that an attempt to use C3D for BIM is a promising project for the geometric kernel since it might open some new (hopefully original or maybe innovative) directions of software development. Finally, I am sure that active entering into the BIM audience is, among other things, an effective marketing move to better promote the flagship ASCON solutions.

Extended version in Russian