Steffen Wrote:I also sometimes would like to be able to create the "old building instructions" look.
So the general idea of making our library useable for that case is of course a good one.
However, I see the following points of the current solution which make me doubt
and which - to me - appear to require re-thinking it over:
It seems that tons of individual parts have to be edited to achieve the look.
I would much better like that just some primitives are swapped, and Bam!, you have the new look.
For example in the bar pictures you posted above, instead of 11 times patching an official file, just patching 1 time the affected primitive should be enough.
Offering an alternative set of primitives which give you that look would also avoid the necessity of having to introduce a syntax extension like 0 !OBI.
You bring up some great points. We did about 2 or 3 trial runs at different approaches before we concluded what the minimum necessary work would be to realize proper implementation.
Our greatest challenge (which probably doubled the work on implementation, and made implementation with LDVIEW non-trivial) was allowing OBI on opaque parts, while preventing it on transparent*. At one point, we toyed with the idea of separate primitive sets for those two classes of parts.
We even attempted different parsing tools that would blanket-convert the .DAT library over to these kinds of targets.
In the end, not messing with the library as issued and allowing innocuous comments added to existing code was deemed the best approach (and, as I mentioned, the point of a 0 ! syntax extension).
I really appreciate your vigor, Steffan, but in the end I am not advocating that this (optional) syntax be adopted by the standards committee. As I said earlier in the thread, I was advised by an ex-committee member to not even bother.
If you wanted to continue to visit this, beware that the 11 commands in 3895.dat apply to uses of 4-4cyli.dat. Weigh in your mind how -- on the one hand -- shading 4-4cyli.dat might affect the family of parts in general, versus -- on the other -- how re-authoring all "TECHNIC bricks" to use a primitive in order to support this feature might work.
We put a lot of design time in to make it work. I guess you can only trust me when I tell you that we did our due diligence.
-- joshua
* one could point out that in modern BI, the shading is applied equally to studs on both opaque and transparent parts, but this was not always true, and we strove for the most flexible approach to allow one to render at one whatever time period was desired (within the limits of practicality).