[LDView] Extra search directories not working?

[Travis Cobbs]

On a similar note, is there a way to make LDView display unofficial updates to official parts in the main ldraw directory, other than embedding them? Or is that how it's designed to work?

It should technically be possible to force LDView to look for Unofficial files before looking for official ones, but doing so is not recommended. The problem is that once an unofficial file becomes official, it is no longer present as an unofficial file on the LDraw parts tracker. You are then stuck with whatever the last version of the file was that you downloaded into your Unofficial directory (which may not be the last update that was posted there).

If you still want LDView to do that, you should be able to create a ~/.ldrawrc with the following contents:

Code:

[LDrawSearch]
1=<MODELDIR>
2=<UNOFFIC><HIDE><DEFPRIM><LDRAWDIR>\\Unofficial\\P
3=<UNOFFIC><DEFPART><LDRAWDIR>\\Unofficial\\PARTS
4=<HIDE><DEFPRIM><LDRAWDIR>\\P
5=<DEFPART><LDRAWDIR>\\PARTS
6=<LDRAWDIR>\\MODELS

Note: I don't think I've ever tested this. The above is in LDraw.ini format, and the parsing in LDView is done by Lars C. Hassing's LDrawIni library. Please see there for details on the format of the information.

Also note that the above uses LDView's default Unofficial directory. I'm not sure what happens if you replace <LDRAWDIR>\\Unofficial\\PARTS with the full path to your Unofficial directory. I think that LDView's automatic downloads of Unofficial parts only works in <LDRAWDIR>\\Unofficial, but it's been so long since I even looked at that code, that I can't remember for sure. However, if you simply add the Stud.io Unofficial/parts and Unofficial/p directories as new entries in the LDrawSearch path above (omitting the <UNOFFIC> tag), and then put the above <UNOFFIC> entries at the end of the list (as 7 and 8), it might do what you want.

Note: paths in ~/.ldrawrc need to use \\ as path separators, not /.