Hi folks,

I've got a request from Mike Heidemann in regard of the:

0 !THEME Theme name

command in OMR files. We discussed how detailed and how "deep" we should go in the hierarchy of LEGO themes. We have therefore downloaded BL's theme list you'll find at the LDraw wiki:

http://wiki.ldraw.org/index.php?title=LDraw_Themes

Look at the list it seems reasonable to use two levels - kind of:

Adventurers / Desert
Adventurers / Dino Island
Adventurers / Jungle

but not three:

Town / Classic Town / Airport
Town / Classic Town / Building
Town / Classic Town / Cargo

for most themes, while some could stand just with the main theme such as:

Creator
Universal Building Set

However sometimes things go wired when you have:

Town / City / Police
Town / Classic Town / Police
Town / Police
Town / World City / Police

We would like to invite the community to come up with some general rules which could be used to cut town the current list.

w.

The Parts Tracker history graph has been improved to always show the latest daily entry on the right-hand side, and count backwards from there for the preceding bars. Previously it counted forward from "the beginning of time", so you could have to wait up to 15 days to see the current state.

Here we summarise the results of the nomination process. The post contains a list of nominees in the format:
Nominee name : Nomination Status (Nominator, Second)

Orion Pobursky : Accepted (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Willy Tschager : Accepted (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Scott Wardlaw : Accepted (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Chris Dee : Accepted (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)

Kevin Clague : Pending (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Sergio Reano : Pending (Scott Wardlaw, Orion Pobursky)
Greg Taft : Pending (Scott Wardlaw, Orion Pobursky)

Travis Cobbs : Declined (Tim Gould)
Tim Gould : Declined (Jean-Philippe Ouellet)
Philippe Hurbain : Declined (Jean-Philippe Ouellet, Tim Gould)
Roland Melkert : Declined (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Magnus Forsberg : Declined (Travis Cobbs, Philippe Hurbain)
Allen Smith : Declined (Tim Gould, Travis Cobbs)
Jim DeVona : Declined (Jean-Philippe Ouellet, Tim Gould)
Ken Drew : Declined (Scott Wardlaw, Orion Pobursky)

Replies to this have been disabled. The nominations thread is where they belong.

Per the LDraw.org Bylaws at http://www.ldraw.org/article268.html, Subsection
6.03(a), the 2011/2012 Steering Committee hereby calls for the community to
nominate individuals as candidates for the 2012/2013 Steering Committee[1].

Please post nominations in response to this message. Nominations will only be
recognized if they are in response to this message.

Per ss.6.03(a), you must specify the name of the person you are nominating,
along with your name. Another member of the community must second the nomination
in a reply, and the nominee must publicly accept the nomination in the same
channel (direct reply to the nomination or second) in order to be valid. If the
nominee does not accept, it will be assumed that he or she has declined, and
they will not be placed on the ballot.

Nominations will close at 11:59 PM GMT on 29 February 2012. This means that to
be listed on the ballot, a candidate must have been nominated, seconded and must
have formally stated acceptance by that time.

The Steering Committee will give sufficient notice of the election and election
procedures per ss.6.03(b).

NOTE: subsection 6.03(b) states that elections should take place before March 1.
We interpret this to mean that we will commence the election on March 1, but
since it is electronic, it will run for 2 weeks, just as last time. The exact
time and date of start and end will be announced sometime very close to (but
after) 0000 GMT March 1.

Again, thanks to all of you for your commitment to the goals of the
organization, and in working with us this year. Please, stay involved with
LDraw.org and keep it moving forward!

Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw.org Steering Committee

--
[1] Try not to confuse the LDraw.org Steering Committee (SteerCo) with the LDraw
Standards Committee (LSC). The Steering Committee sets the course for the LDraw
Organization while the Standards Committee deals with the LDraw File Format.

Following the discussion in the Standrad Committee forum:

Allen Smith Wrote:I don't consider leading whitespace on a line to be valid. I think there's a difference between "separates" and "starts with." My parser will accept it some places by accident, but considers it a syntax error in many other places.

Hi folks,

I just updated the MLCad.ini file accordingly to the latest LDraw.org parts
update 2011-02. The .ini file defines (among other things) the parts available
in MLCad's minifigure generator. This is by far the most extensive addition of
minifig parts I remember.

Download the file from my website: http://www.holly-wood.it/mlcad/ini-en.html

A direct download is available at: http://www.holly-wood.it/files/mlcad/MLCad.ini

Bye, w.

Anchor for Technic Series

Traditionally LDraw has always been installed under C:\LDraw on Windows machines.
I never liked the idea of placing it directly under C.. somehow it seemed unorganised and made more sense under Program Files. The AIOI does just that and on my Windows / machine creates the LDraw folder under C:\Program Files (x86)\LDraw. This has 2 drawbacks though.

First of all, the AIOI is used by many people who want a simple, fast out-of-the-box LDraw installation. But when they want to update the parts library they find the proposed installation path given by the executable LDraw.org provides is the traditional C:\LDraw. They are unlikely to remember where the AIOI installed everything and if they simply go ahead and install the update will not show up in their MLCad.

Secondly, if they are clever enough to use LDView to update their library they run into another problem: LDView will throw an error and not install the update. The reason is that LDview has no admin rights to make any changes to the installation folder and so cannot install the update. In order to fix this a user needs to go into C:\Program Files (x86)\LDraw and remove the "read-only" option for that folder and all files and folders included in it.

I have addressed this issue on the HispaBrick Magazine blog.

Neither of these situations is ideal. Granted, LDraw users might be expected to have some computer skills, but ideally LDraw should be accessible to anyone without the need to know these things.

I don't know which location is preferable for LDraw (C:\Program Files (x86)\LDraw or C:\LDraw) but it would make sense to help users as much as possible to avoid any confusion. Maybe the LDraw.org update could include an AIOI option to make sure files are installed at the right location.

At the same time, maybe it is possible for the AIOI to change privileges for the installation folder so as to ensure that LDView can actually carry out a parts update without running into problems.

Neither of these two situations is ideal.

Does anyone of you have an executable of WINDZ available to give me?
It seems to not be downloadable anywhere anymore.
I've been BFCing parts in the past some time, always using the "manual method", i.e.,
looking at the part in LDView, identifying the wrongly oriented faces, coloring them in MLCad,
then changing their winding in LDDP, or inserting INVERTNEXT's.
When I look at parts in red/green BFC checking mode in LDView, I always thought
that the BFCing process - to a certain extent - should be easily automatable;
I think that's what WINDZ also does:
just render the part from various perspectives, and flip all faces that appear "red" during that.
Of course, if a surface gets flipped twice this way, it cannot automatically be oriented correctly,
and manual post-correction is needed. However, for a majority of parts, the described
method should trivially work like a breeze.
Does anyone of you know of software which does that?
I want to speedup my BFCing processing...
Having such a software would allow us to instantly BFC big amounts of our library,
and reduce the remaining manual work to the parts which really require attention.
My best preference would be a tool like edger, command line based,
and simply taking an input file, outputting a result file where all faces are oriented correctly,
and the file otherwise unchanged. Undecidable surfaces should be colored in a user-selected color,
so they can be taken care of manually.

Hi all,

Below is a perl script to take a bunch of angles and convert them to points on the edge of a circle primitve (ie. a 16 or 48 point polygon). The comments up top describe how to use it. It's designed to make generating rims on the bottom of curved parts relatively easy when there's only a few segments required and hand-coding makes more sense than using Philo's wonderful toys.

Tim