Do we need another LDraw building program?

[Roland Melkert]

Hi,

First, let me apologize by posting into an old thread, but I couldn't find a more appropriate one.

Hello and welcome to you too. There is no harm in starting a new one. Maybe an admin can split this one off?

I was searching around looking to see if I could run LDCad on my Mac. The LDCad site directed me to the forums, so here I am.

I might be able to get LDCad running on my Mac, with some fiddling. Running it natively would be a stretch, but running under XQuartz seems more likely.

But I can't, because I cannot access the source code.

I'm the author of LDCad and I've been asked about making it open source a number of times. In fact I'm starting to reconsider it as a result. But my greatest (silly) concerns are still in place, namely:

1: The source is less then clean as it is a write as I go project. (It's like building a house and start attaching extensions for which the foundation is not always appropriate.)

2: All comments and reminders etc are in dutch. The more obvious (to me) portions of the code don't have comments at all.

3: I'm very picky about the internals so from time to time I like to rewrite large portions of it, something which would be a nightmare when working with multiple people I'm guessing.

4: Some of the .cpp files are huge (e.g. the LDraw file handling classes file is over 11.000 lines alone. This is excluding the individual ldraw line handling which in total adds another 10.000 lines or so). I guess this is the result of me having a Delphi background

As a result of all this I'm not comfortable setting it 'free', and if I would there is still the issue of where as I'm not really a fan of sourceforge (anymore) and as I still prefer svn github isn't my first choice ether.

All it really means is that others can contribute to your project. For example, would a Mac build of LDCad be appreciated? If not certainly by the author of LDCad (I'm assuming this is you), but certainly others in the community.

Why a binary for Mac has not been released, I do not know. If it's simply because the author doesn't have the time, resources, or test machine to get a Mac version running--please know that others _do_ have the time and resources, and they are happy to contribute.

The main reason there is currently no mac version is indeed lack of a mac myself. I tried cross compiling several times but couldn't get it to work so far. I would also settle for a VM but Apple's licensing policies make that impossible.

A while back I considered getting a macbook as I'm not a big fan of windows 10 and could use a new laptop in the near future. If so a mac version will follow soon after

As for the source dependencies LDCad should be portable to anything supporting wxWidgets and has full OpenGL (not just ES) support. The only additional things needed are some low level calls I'm doing like:

Code:

#ifdef LDC_MSWIN
const bool TString::fileExistsCore(const lowLevelFileNameStr &fileName) {
  struct _stat statBuf;
  return _wstat(fileName.c_str(), &statBuf)==0;
};
#endif

#ifdef LDC_LINUX
const bool TString::fileExistsCore(const lowLevelFileNameStr &fileName) {
  struct stat statBuf;
  return stat(fileName.c_str(), &statBuf)==0;
};
#endif



#ifdef LDC_MSWIN
const bool TString::fileDeleteCore(const lowLevelFileNameStr &fileName) {
  return _wremove(fileName.c_str())==0;
};
#endif

#ifdef LDC_LINUX
const bool TString::fileDeleteCore(const lowLevelFileNameStr &fileName) {
  return remove(fileName.c_str())==0;
};
#endif