Grasshopper 2.0 Alpha 1 is finally available for public testing. If you have Rhino8 Wip installed, you can download and install the grasshopper2 plug-in via the _PackageManager and started with the _G2 command. Grasshopper 2 can be installed and used alongside Grasshopper 1.
Important things to know:
- Grasshopper 2 is not finished.
- Grasshopper 2 cannot open gh and ghx files.
- Grasshopper 2 cannot load gha plug-ins.
- Grasshopper 2 is not cushioned.
- Grasshopper 2 is in flux.
- Grasshopper 1 is not dead.
To elaborate on each item in this list:
- Many features are still missing. It will probably take about a year to add the remaining types, components, and features.
- There’s a new file format called
ghzwhich is used by GH2. Although data can be exchanged between GH1 and GH2 using the Data Input and Data Output components (called Data From File and Data To File in GH2), at present there’s no better way. This will be an area of intense focus soon, but the problem is hard. - Grasshopper 2.0 is a total rewrite, there have been many design changes in the core code and plug-ins simply cannot be upgraded. Again, the ability to leverage GH1 functionality from within GH2 is something we’re going to focus on, but it will take time.
- There is little error handling in GH2 because at this stage in the development we want to find out where the bugs are rather than try and prevent them from crashing your computer. When GH2 crashes, please please please send in the crash report.
- Big changes are made almost every week to central algorithms. This often breaks the SDK making GH2 plug-in development a versioning nightmare. We highly recommend waiting a few months with third party plug-in development until the core has stabilised and until the standard feature set is more mature.
- Development on Grasshopper 1.0 continues with both new features and bug fixes. GH1 will remain part of the standard Rhino installation for a long time to come. It is not however clear when GH2 will be included in standard Rhino. It may be that Rhino8 ships before this happens.
