December 3rd, 2019 - Mineral classification


I'd have never thought it would be so complicated and LONG to make a proper mineralogical classification, and after that come up with a proper way to filter through it to extract revelant mineral names (be it varieties, species or groups)! "Scapolite" for example isn't a mineral species or variety, but a damn group (it's a solid solution with three endmembers). You would need elemental identification to make sure which variety it is, if you actually cared.



Anyway, after 50+ hours on it, it works fine, I'll stick to the most frequently used minerals in faceting for now. After all it's an external library for GemSuite, and as such I can make changes to it in the future (the magic of automatic and on-the-fly updates). With all this hard work I finally have a PROPER (easy, yet exhaustive) "mineral kind" input functionality in GemSuite Scanner, which is a must-have for the optical axis functionality. Just because not everything is isotropic in Nature, and I have big plans for the Modeler! More to come soon...
Tom, a.k.a. Ludwig Von Sodabowski