Tim Gould asked that we come up with an official policy for Stud Groups. Unless I'm misunderstanding, he believes that stud groups of arbitrary X by Y dimensions should be created to fulfill the needs of any individual part, and others disagree.

I personally would lean towards restricting stud groups to 1xX, Xx1, and XxX (square). Most existing plates could be accommodated with at most three stud groups. However, I'm not a parts author, so I don't feel that my opinion on this should carry as much weight as part authors (both here on the LSC and not). Also, I agree with Tim that since there is disagreement about these among existing parts authors, it's better for us to set a standard (either direction) than to leave things like they are now.

Given that this affects parts authors, I invite all parts authors with an opinion on the issue to chime in on Tim's thread, to hopefully help us in our decision-making.

Help -is there is a way to convert a .leg file? I do not have Lego CAD

Here is an example:
http://daviscreek.cabe.k12.wv.us/legocad...lenges.htm

Firstly, hello and congratulations to the new LSC.

Secondly... stud groups. I'd really appreciate some clarity.

Personally I think any basic plate should potentially have an equivalent stud group and certainly the small ones. Mike and Steffen disagree.

Luckily we have a team of people who can resolve this issue officially once and for all. I'm happy to go with whatever is decided but I'd like to see a decision. In the grand scheme of things it's a minor issue but it's one that Mike felt strongly enough about to place a hold and I felt strongly enough about to disagree with the hold.

And a note on the solution should be added to the primitives reference page. Which I shall do when it happens.

Cheers,

Tim

Each year, the LSC is supposed to make up its own procedures. Typically, the most important procedure is the decision on what is required to accept a proposal as a standard. There have been a number of different ways this has been done, but last year the rule was that a proposal required at least 3 YES votes and no more than one NO vote. I'm personally in favor of this, with the added proviso this year that voting ends no more than one week after a call for votes has been made. (That way if we get three YES votes, there's a defined end date for waiting on the two possible NO votes, in case someone stops communicating.)

The above is my proposal for this year's LSC, but I'm certainly open to other suggestions. The reasoning behind this framework is that if two of us feel strongly enough about something to vote NO, the proposal is probably marginal enough that it should be reconsidered. On the other hand, if one or even two people stop communicating, the others can still get things passed, and obviously there could be times when some of us really don't have a strong enough opinion to cast a YES or NO vote.

One thing that hasn't been done in the past (that I remember), but is suggested in the LSC Charter is that we request for comments from the community after coming up with something but before voting on it. Given that all our discussions here are public, I'm not sure that's necessary, but I thought I'd mention it since it hasn't been done in the past.

<Admin curtain up>
The 2 new members of the LSC now have permission to post here
</Never mind the man behind the curtain>

Since we had only 5 confirmed nominees, no election is necessary. Therefore, without further ado, the 2011/2012 LDraw Standards Committee is:

• Travis Cobbs
  
• Allen Smith
  
• Roland Melkert
  
• Chris Dee
  
• Willy Tschager
  

It seems that the last two messages of this thread (http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?tid=1288), one from Tim and one from myself, have disappeared now (I still have both in my RSS reader)...???

Hello all,

I'm very proud to (finally) present my new LDraw editor called LDCad.

It's a grid based editor (like MLCad is) but with modern rendering and (hopefully) some additional editing features which should make things easier.

Long story short, check "LDCad 1.0 beta 1" out here:

http://www.melkert.net/LDCad

Hope you like it and don't hold back on comments / requests etc.

Roland

Hi all,


New Hinge LDraw by gambort, on Flickr

I just whipped up the new hinge part this morning (I'll post .dats when I have part numbers) and noticed it's thrown up a little 'issue'.

The real technic holes are actually centered at about 9LDU from the top of the part, rather than 10LDU like we use in LDraw. On this particular part it means that the bit where the technic connector joins the main body has a small (2LDU odd) bridge from the connector to the plate, while in LDraw the bridge can't be there due to the center and radius.

I think that leaving the bridge off is the best option in this case. But it's something I've never run into before.

Tim

Isecalc (now version 1.4) and Rectifier (version 1.6) have been updated to use dynamic memory management. The size of files they can manage is now limited only by your PC memory. Or more probably by your patience...

Isecalc line condensation method was also improved to avoid the tiny line segments that previous version often produced.