2024 was a dense year for PCS. We achieved many things like the complete PCS Wiki and implemented countless minor improvements and bug fixes. As we face 2025, it’s time for a new Dev Diary, where we discuss, what happened in the past months and what is about to come. For this year, we plan major things, so let’s dig in.
- Improved Tree Extraction toolkit
We introduced the revised tree extraction toolkit in our blog last year, but we would like to highlight its importance again, as it’s a major change. PCS does contain this toolkit from the early days of PCS around 2014, but for a long time, it has not been updated. Now, our team has deeply changed the mechanics, so it’s way easier to extract trees to a database with the required attributes or represent the trees with circles. Depending on the area, the scanner type and the point cloud quality you are using – based on a small sample project – an average user can extract 400 – 800 trees per workday. Of course, there are advanced AI solutions for tree inventories, and some scanner manufacturers can offer automatic extraction with geometry as well, but as we mentioned before, we do not aim for automation, we aim for tools, which can help our users to perform a manual task faster.
If you are interested in the tree extraction workflow, please check our related wiki page.
- Multi Geometry support
Multi-geometry objects like MultiPolyline or MultiPolygon are commonly pain to handle, and it was not been properly supported in PCS so far. Now the users have the opportunity to build or explode these objects in a user-friendly way properly. Our developers still working to expand this functionality further to make sure you can use all these geometry types properly and use other PCS tools like Pipe/Corridor to make nice pipe TIN models as a single multi polygon per pipe.
- LandXML support
We continue to implement new formats to our software to make sure our users can serve a wider range of clients. Road designers commonly use LandXML, and we have a bunch of road extraction tools so it was a logical step to move forward in this direction. TIN generation has been part of the software for many years, but now we can handle LandXML. It’s still in the early stage, but we hope our users can profit from this improvement as well.
- Classification Pre-Sets
PCS supports also from the early days manual and semi-automatic classifications. It was a long-time-debt against our users to implement classification pre-sets, where the user can pre-define the from-to classes, and quickly switch between them, to enhance the classification processes. The function will be available to all of our users during Q1 2025. Stay tuned!
- Templates for PCS
It is a priority for our team to help our users with their personal goals and align our content as well. As PCS is a Hungarian software, we would like to contribute to our local users. Some countries have a unified layer layout for land survey-related tasks, but our country has only a recommendation provided by the Chamber of Engineers. We prepared this template for our users to ensure they can use our toolkit in an effective way without the need to prepare their own template! The template is available in our wiki!
- Software protection update
Your most common question is: Can we use the software without a hardware key? We know it might be uncomfortable for you to use a physical hardware key and it makes the software trial process more complicated. We started to inspect the options for a different software protection, that might be able to replace the current hardware key protection. We plan to inspect and implement this feature by the end of 2025 if all test goes well. We will keep you updated in the upcoming Dev Diaries about this progress.
Thank you for reading our latest update, and stay tuned! 2025 will be an awesome year, and we hope we can bring affordable and effective point cloud extraction to even more engineers this year!