This week in FreeCAD development:

Sketcher

• Bojan9597 fixed precision loss in the Dimension tool (PR#30157).
• PaddleStroke fixed a confusing behavior when entering angle values in the Polyline’s on-view parameter boxes (PR#30479).
• matthiasdanner added on-view parameter resetting on clicking in the Polyline and BSpline tools when creating a new segment (PR#31209).
• maxwxyz fixed a bug that would interrupt creating a sequence of tangentially connected arcs with the Polyline tool in certain scenarios (PR#31139).
• Lokestrom fixed a bug where minor and major radius would get swapped when sketching ellipse arcs (PR#31343).

Part and PartDesign

• PaddleStroke fixed a bug that made all subtractive tools use the same icon and name in the task panel (PR#31045). He also partially fixed performance issues with pattern tools by removing an extra recompute of multitransforms (PR#30872).
• drwho495 fixed a toponaming-related issue where FreeCAD would often remove perfectly valid geometry when an element loses reference in a fillet or chamfer operation (PR#31411).

CAM

tarman3 patched Probe to use the bounding box rather than the volume of the selected shape to define probe area (PR#30609), fixed cycle time for dress-ups (PR#31110). He also contributed the first step towards making helix ramp an option in Profile and Pocket to make this feature more discoverable (PR#26957).

TechDraw

• WandererFan fixed using a custom section line color (PR#31386) and balloon positioning (PR#30895).
• wwmayer fixed a crash that occurred when opening a drawing created in 0.21 (PR#31186, cherry-picked by maxwxyz).

BIM

Roy-043 fixed deactivation of spatial objects like levels and buildings (PR#31064) and the cloning of stairs (PR#30960). He also added support for different pipe diameter values in the T-connector (PR#29504).

Other changes

• marioalexis84 added options to reverse master and slave references for Contact and Tie constraints in FEM (PR#31055).
• tritao contributed a patch that prepares the codebase for the new renderer (PR#31187). Scene construction, screen-space geometry, mesh render data, framebuffer capture, and teardown are made more explicit, deterministic, and reusable while preserving the existing rendering path.
• ElementW boosted the loading of workbench resources multifold (PR#29904).

Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by adrianinsaval, chennes, greg19, ItSaulGoodMan, j-hewett, KKTHEGREAT07, Lgt2x, maxwxyz, Roy-043, TravisThomp, tritao, and wwmayer.

If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here.

Activity stats

PR stats: since the previous report, 67 pull requests have been merged, and 35 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: overall, there are 3508 open issues in the tracker, up by 4 from last week.

Elsewhere in the community

KiCad developers recently announced they will be using FreeCAD’s PlaneGCS constraint solver in v11. The feature is already available in nightly builds.