Now that STEP has been released, here's a quick rundown on our plans and notions for the future.

Initially we concentrated on trimmed surfaces, but solids are coming along nicely now. At some point we need to consider the much harder problem of determining when trimmed surfaces would profit from being stitched together into solids.

IGES development has slowed down, though we expect a steady stream of minor patches and bugfixes for a long time. And we have many ideas for small improvements to play with.

VDAFS is a much simpler format than IGES, and all of the tools and trimming aids carry over. The only big change foreseen here is tackling proper VDAFS shells.

STEP is the baby of the three translators. We need to improve many things and look at protocols other than AP203 in the short term future.

We have a crude SAT reader working now. We hope to have a pre-release ready to go by July 2001.

We have acquired the XT specifiction from Parasolid. We currently hope to have a pre-release of a XT reader in early fall 2001.

DXF is an ugly, ugly format, and far too complicated to completely implement. (For one thing, our understanding is that it now can embed Acis SAT files, and that alone makes it as complicated as IGES.) However, we have already had several requests for this, so again, we will investigate more fully sometime in the near future.