LDForge

[Nils Schmidt]

Hope you just venting and not quitting LDraw all together.

I've been working on LDraw related stuff for 15 years now and one thing I learned about it is to always develop mainly for yourself as it is a very small community so interest by others will be limited.

On the plus side this means software downloads on your site will stay below the default hosting limits

It's been a long while since I've had time or motivation to author another part. And it turns out that I don't exactly know very much about 3D geometry and making a CAD program is a bad way to learn such a thing. There's literally nowhere to learn about things like CSG algorithms and OpenGL is impossible to deal with. It's just pain working on this nowadays and there's no reason to anyway with LDPartEditor exists.

Oh, well... that's a pitty. You're right... it is a pain to write dynamic lighting, shading and CSG stuff!
Roland got the point. Our community is just very, very small.

Due to my experience, I could be of assistance to your project as you might want to continue your development in the future.
You could also ask lots of experts on OpenGL and 3D related programming in other forums, too.
There are a lot of good OpenGL books out there... The OpenGL SuperBible is my favourite reference.

I am familar with C++, too. I could provide a lighting setup (4 lightsources) or translate my general CSG algorithm into C++ and more... if this would help you.

My CSG implementation is far from perfect and will never be free from errors (t-junctions, gaps).
The triangulation is very difficult. The minimum-weight triangulation is a NP-hard problem and the detection of t-junctions is also challenging.
Therefore all approaches to convert CSG bodies to a "good" set of triangles are rocket sience.

I do not attempt to "compete" with my part authoring programs. I just like to develop these programs as a hobby, since my daily development work for business applications is not sophisticated at all...