There’s a new slicer in town: preFlight.
I know, you are wondering why there is yet another FFF slicing software package. There are seemingly dozens of them on the loose these days, mostly ports of OrcaSlicer — which was a port of PrusaSlicer — which was a port of Slic3r. There are also a few ports of UltiMaker Cura, although far fewer now than in the past.
The issue is that these are all more or less the same software base with somewhat different features. Over time — and there’s been quite a bit of time since this software tree was hatched — quite a bit of technical debt has accumulated.
Technical debt is the IT term for aging software components: the software still works, but gets increasingly creaky as time passes. Technical debt is usually very challenging to fix because on the surface nothing seems to change. It’s all about changing the foundation of the tool. In commercial operations it is a really big deal because the finance types won’t want to spend money “building something that does the same thing”.
But here these tools are open source, so things are a bit different. A small company from Georgia (USA), oozeBot, has taken the step to remove a huge amount of technical debt from the software tree by forking (making a new branch) of PrusaSlicer. They call it “preFlight”.
The big thing they’ve done is completely rework the innards of the software. For example, the software now uses a 64-bit architecture throughout, meaning many overflow situations will no longer happen. Here are other major changes:
- True 64-bit Architecture: No coordinate overflow, no silent failures
- Modern Stack: C++20, Clipper2, Boost 1.90, CGAL 6.1, OpenCASCADE 7.9, Eigen 5.0
- High Precision: Clipper2 compiled with 10-decimal high precision
- In-Memory Processing: No temp files, ~50% less RAM usage
- Athena Perimeter Generator: Independent overlap control no other slicer offers
- Interlocking Perimeters: Enhanced Z-bonding without added cost or complexity
Many of these changes are so significant that they would be nearly impossible to introduce into any of the usual updates, leading to oozeBot making the decision to fork the code into a new tool.
You’ll note that along with the architecture changes, there are two very intriguing new user features, Athena Perimeter Generator and Interlocking Perimeters. oozeBot explains the Athena Perimeter Generator:
“We forked Arachne to modernize it in several ways. Athena uses fixed extrusion width instead of variable and independent overlap control between perimeters. Arachne calculates overlap automatically. Athena lets you specify exactly how much perimeters overlap. It even enables negative overlap for creating gaps between perimeters.”
The Interlocking Perimeters feature is a nod to Bricklayers, the frequently mentioned and possibly illegal-to-use method of staggering extrusion heights to increase layer bonding.
Instead of playing with the Z height as Bricklayers does, the Interlocking Perimeters feature plays with X-Y location on alternating layers. They fiddle with over extrusion when doing so to fill gaps and provide more bonding between layers. They say it can provide 5-15% additional layer strength, and does not cost any extra print time to do so.
There are several other interesting features, and I encourage you to check out their GitHub page. The software is open source, and free to download.
At the moment, the software is still considered in beta mode, and is available only for the Windows platform. However, they are apparently working on versions for Linux and Mac OS.
This is a very impressive piece of work by the oozeBot team, when you consider that none of the big names using the original Slic3r technology and its descendants bothered to remake the foundation in this way. I’m looking at Bambu Lab, OrcaSlicer, Creality, Anycubic, Prusa Research, and others.
My hope is that those same companies take note of this development, and consider switching their software versions to a more modern base. On that base, not only will many long-standing problems disappear, but it could enable the development of new features that could not have been implemented before.
