For our fifth year, BRL-CAD is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! Students must submit a proposal application before the May 3rd deadline with selected students announced on May 27th. Those selected get to work on various interesting projects that help improve BRL-CAD.

Out of only 10 chosen, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD was accepted to participate in Google Code-In (GCI)! Complementary to the highly successful Google Summer of Code program for university students, GCI is a contest encouraging pre-university students (age 13-17) to get involved with open source. Students will work our "itty-bitty" tasks related to code, documentation/training, outreach/research, quality assurance, and user interface.

After more than six months development, BRL-CAD 7.22.0 is now available! This is a substantial introduction of a new development line encompassing more changes than any prior version since BRL-CAD's release as free open source software.

The forwarded announcement below describes an achievement for one of our optional dependencies, the Open Shading Language (OSL) from Sony Pictures Imageworks. OSL is basically an open source shader system that helps rendering tools make better pictures. Kudos to their developers -- it's quite an impressive achievement to have an entire film shaded with just OSL.

For BRL-CAD's fourth year participating in the Google Summer of Code, we expanded our involvement and accepted a record 11 students. Predominantly evaluated on the student's ability to develop, communicate, and interact, their proposals were selected from among more than 50 received as exceptional candidate developers for BRL-CAD. A categorized summary of this year's projects follows.

BRL-CAD is once again delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code! BRL-CAD was selected as a mentoring organization and will be helping students develop project proposals through the April 6th application deadline. Any students interested in joining the BRL-CAD development team this summer can jump straight to our project ideas page. We're certainly open to other ideas too. As a comparatively smaller development community, chances of having a good application accepted are (very) high with BRL-CAD so join our mailing list and introduce yourself today!

A little over a month ago at a week-long coffee-infused hack-a-thon in-person gathering, many of our core developers worked on improving BRL-CAD's source code. The team inspected and fixed more than fifteen hundred issues being reported by Coverity Static Analysis*. Just released, the 2011 Coverity Open Source Integrity Report includes a two-page case study detailing our efforts. The free report is available (registration req'd) through the Open Scan Initiative website.

A new version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available for download. The ProE-BRL plugin is a production exporter that has been developed over the years as a means of importing geometry into BRL-CAD from Pro/ENGINEER. This update of the plugin for the Windows platform supports Wildfire 4 (64-bit), Wildfire 5 (64-bit), and Creo (32-bit and 64-bit). The plugin will work on other platforms, but will have to be compiled from a source distribution.

The Advanced Joint Effectiveness Model (AJEM) [1] development team recently announced the availability of a new AJEM release. As BRL-CAD is incorporated as an integral part of AJEM, a brief overview is provided.

After a few month release hiatus, BRL-CAD 7.20.4 is now available providing several dozen bug fixes and feature enhancements. Our support for NURBS geometry continues to stabilize with improved step-g import support, ray tracing enhancements, better wireframes, and numerous robustness improvements. MGED/Archer continues to approach an alpha release with support added for interactive editing of pipe primitives, improved visualization, new BoT mesh healing capabilities, and more.