Two new repositories were created yesterday named “LunarMP” and “LunarSlicer”. They’re still empty, but I was wondering if anyone has heard about plans for a new slicer?
If you’re waiting for a snapmaker employee to reply, you’ll be waiting a while. They appear to read the forum, but rarely post. I don’t use Facebook, so I can’t tell you if they’re more interactive over there.
I wasn’t expecting to hear from an employee as I’m aware that they aren’t active on the forums anymore. It just seemed like a sudden addition to the GitHub so I was curious if anyone active on Facebook or GitHub heard about anything, the lack of response gave me that answer though.
As an update, it looks like they are making a new slicer forked from Cura 4.7/4.8. They’ve also been making a lot of commits to Luban recently, so I wonder what the timeline on releasing it will be and if it will be substantially different from Luban or just a new engine.
I had always assumed Snapmaker3D was a fork of Cura, given how similar the UI is and that it uses CuraSlicer. I never looked deeply enough to realize that Luban was a reimplementation in Javascript. It probably doesn’t help that I formed my opinion in the Snapmaker3D days, before SnapmakerJS and Luban were published to github.
I’m ok with them continuing Luban as is. I think it’s a good starter slicer for new users. And it’s a pretty seamless transition to Cura when users outgrow it. Especially now that the SM2.0 profiles exist in Cura. Forking and renaming Cura seems ambitious. I’d rather see the SM team submit pull requests to the Cura project. But that’s me; they’re free to do what they think is best.
I agree. I think Luban helps a lot for new users, and unless you have an issue with it or just like having more control there’s no real reason to change. I am curious what made them decide that it was worth forking from a newer version of Cura and reimplementing their UI changes and other modifications, but I guess we’ll see once more updates come out.
A bit unrelated, but there’s a pull request under Luban for testing adding an A400 machine. Perhaps they want to release a new slicer alongside the new machine? Purely speculation, but interesting to think about.
it blows my mind that there was something worse than Luban lololol. serious though respect to my elder in that regard.
personally i have gotten way better results with prusa than cura. like… massively better. with little effort. there are two projects on github that add sm2 profiles to prusa, including 3d models so you can even see the machine in the 3d. (which i edited down to just the bed plate myself)
as of writing this, the LunarSlicer repo is no longer empty, though the readme is just cura again.
Snapmaker3D was pretty similar to Luban, and probably was an unreleased fork of Cura. It did not support CNC or Laser, only 3D printing.
It’s odd the way Snapmaker forks projects. They could’ve just clicked the fork button in GH, but instead they cloned it, renamed it, and pushed it to a new repo. The firmware is similar. It’s clearly Marlin based, but the first couple of times it was posted (as a zip), they stripped the git history.