In one word: Wow!
It works great here, performance is good, rendering quality could be better (I still prefer LDView
) but it's already quite good and very legible.
I like the hide feature and info panel.
Actually the only thing that bothers me is the "complete.zip" usage. I agree it can be useful for newbies, or to create a standalone, portable viewer (eg. to carry it on a usb dongle), but it's a pain for a regular LDraw user.
Maybe a mouse shortcut for panning?
Yes, there are 2 different audiences. One is a normal library "customer" who simply wants complete.zip takeaway
and only replace it when we make a new parts release.
The other audience is parts authors who want to simply specify their LDRAW base directory.
It would be really cool if this viewer would let users choose between these 2 options by e.g. a radiobutton
in a configuration panel.
Does this program run in a Web browser? Is there a demo somewhere?
No, it's a standalone java application, it doesn't need a web browser (but you need to have a java runtime installed). It can be downloaded on sourceforge at the link provided by Mario.
Hi Philippe and Steffen,
thanks for trying out JLDraw
I surely can arrange a configuration panel where you can choose what library you want (it needs a refactoring of code to deal with filesystem, not only with a zip archive, but it isn't a problem, requires only perspiration
), but in my intentions JLDraw is for normal customer, that wants a "quick and dirty" solution to view a model.
Nevertheless, it is common issue when I download LDraw models from Eurobricks, to say, there are missing parts or submodels, because author checked in his own library installation and there it is fine, but anyone opening model probably has a "standard" library, missing special (custom) parts and submodels. So it can be a check for your model, before release, to open it with "vanilla" standard library and see if all parts are "standard" and all submodels are included.
To check what I say look at
this (submodels missing in almost all models, in 6770 there is only a reference to two sub-model, both missing, the model is rendered empty),
this (reference to part 6538c.dat, not in official library 2014-01).
Ok, I'm going to code next version, with choice of what library use ;-)
Mario
Good point... each published model should be a mpd containing all unofficial/custom parts needed (mpd built with MPDcenter or MPDwizard) but only few people do this properly. That brings me to another issue of JLDraw, it doesn't properly display parts embedded in mpd (try for exemple
this file that includes many unofficial parts)
=8O
Thanks for pointing me this. Even if I tested on lots of LDraw models, probably there aren't any with custom part embedded...
Ready for next release in 1000000... 999999... 999998...
Hi Philippe.
New version is out, with corrected (I hope) handling for custom parts.
I added:
* support for unzipped folder-based LDraw library (official and unofficial)
* pan with mouse (shift-right-click and drag)
* better part identification
As usual on Sorceforge and Eurobricks.
A question: I found some little typos in official part library. Where I can list for future correction?
Mario