Tutorial: Adding unofficial LDraw parts to MLCad

[Willy Tschager]

Digging a little bit deeper I came across these posts:

http://news.lugnet.com/cad/dev/?n=10742

Additionally, LDView is hard-coded to look in the <LDrawDir>/Unofficial/Parts
and <LDrawDir>/Unofficial/p directories when it doesn't find a part in its
search path. It then attempts to download unofficial parts from the part
tracker into that directory if it can't find the part (assuming the user hasn't
disabled this feature).

It could be argued that the user should be able to configure where unofficial
parts get downloaded to, but I'm not sure I'll ever implement that. The way it
is now basically produces a de-facto standard for anyone using LDView, and
adding a configuration option for this would defeat that.

As it happens, BrickSmith on the Mac has these directories in its search path
also (which was purely coincidental; Allen and I didn't talk about it, and
neither of us was aware of the other's use of that directory at the time we did
our implementation).

Willy has a tutorial and sample MLCad.ini file that sets up MLCad to look in
these Unofficial directories.

--Travis

http://news.lugnet.com/cad/dev/?n=11026

[SCAN_ORDER]
1 = SHOW <LDRAWDIR>Parts
2 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>Parts\s
3 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>P
4 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>P\48
5 = SHOW <LDRAWDIR>Unofficial\Parts
6 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>Unofficial\Parts\s
7 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>Unofficial\P
8 = HIDE <LDRAWDIR>Unofficial\P\48

The entries I bolded above are wrong/unnecessary. The HIDE will prevent them from showing up in the parts list, but they’ll still be found when used properly inside other files, since the 48/ or s/ is included in the referring part, and you don’t want them to be found incorrectly if the part is broken.

--Travis

A potential problem could rise with LDView downloading to the VirtualStore on Vista or higher. Looks like I have to address this some how. Thoughts?

w.