Instruction making rant

[Roland Melkert]

I support making them optional. Also it would be a good thing to discourage users from actually changing reference and color. By the way, I can't find any reasonable use for change of color. Is there one? I am not saying it should not be supported.

After some thought I understood that it sometimes necessary to replace the reference: this is needed for flexible parts. Because moving path points by some FLOAT/MOVEGROUP would work only in simple cases, in more complex cases you would need different number of path points, therefore, new submodel. It is still not clear how the fallback code should be handled in case we allow to FLOAT individual path points.

Inventing new metas might be fun, but these kinds of metas (begin end etc) are a nightmare to parse while reading LDraw content.

It is mentioned above the new meta should be able to reference groups, but personally I think it should be an extension on existing existing group mechanics.

This will make parsing the meta alot easier, even more so if you limit to a single one using a submeta.

e.g.

Code:

0 STEP
0 !SOMENEWMETA FLOAT [target=engineBlock] [pos=100 100 100] [color=4] [ori=1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1]
........
0 STEP
0 !SOMENEWMETA FLOAT [target=engineBlock]

Where "engineBlock" is a group name.

The first float 'overrides' position, color and rotation. Just use the parameters which are needed all others initialize with the current values.

The second float uses all default parameters, so it returns the group to its original place, color and rotation.

And if the thing you are floating is a single, once used reference, you could also do something like:

0 !SOMENEWMETA FLOAT [targetKind=ldrRef] [target=3001.dat] [pos=100 100 100] [color=4] [ori=1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1]

This implies that if omitted the targetKind parameter defaults to "group"

my 2cts