Hey,
this is not the first time I think about the possibility to share also non official LEGO parts via LDraw files. From my point of view there are a lot of advantages. The biggest is that you can share your models in digital form.
But in my opinion there should be a clear border; there should be only one official LEGO library.
I think that the situation can be resolved by defining a new meta command that tells the software what library was used to create a model. It is still possible to build models with only the LEGO library but it is also possible to link to third party libraries. The meta command could contain the name of the library, its version and the location where you can download it.
For example:
When there are parts that are not produced by LEGO but should be supported officially by LDraw it would be possible to provide an additional download location on the official LDraw web page. The parts can go through the parts tracker but will end up in a separate lib.
This is not conclusively thought through (the web pages needs to be available all the time, the download locations are not allowed to change, file naming conventions, …)! Just an idea.
Rolf
this is not the first time I think about the possibility to share also non official LEGO parts via LDraw files. From my point of view there are a lot of advantages. The biggest is that you can share your models in digital form.
But in my opinion there should be a clear border; there should be only one official LEGO library.
I think that the situation can be resolved by defining a new meta command that tells the software what library was used to create a model. It is still possible to build models with only the LEGO library but it is also possible to link to third party libraries. The meta command could contain the name of the library, its version and the location where you can download it.
For example:
Code:
0 !LIBRARY Official 1502 http://www.ldraw.org/library/updates/complete1502.zip
0 !LIBRARY Unofficial 20161019133106 http://www.ldraw.org/library/unofficial/ldrawunf.zip
0 !LIBRARY SBrick 1.0 http://www.ldraw.org/library/thirdparty/sbrick_v1.0.zip
0 !LIBRARY LDD 2488 http://www.digital-bricks.de/download/primitives2488.zipWhen there are parts that are not produced by LEGO but should be supported officially by LDraw it would be possible to provide an additional download location on the official LDraw web page. The parts can go through the parts tracker but will end up in a separate lib.
This is not conclusively thought through (the web pages needs to be available all the time, the download locations are not allowed to change, file naming conventions, …)! Just an idea.
Rolf