Do we need another LDraw building program?

[Ben Supnik]

Hi Christopher,

I don't know about the state of other languages - there are a pile of things for Java and the web now - I've lost track.

My main issue with Bricksmith was having to change the perspective to move. I found this too difficult, and am using LeoCAD now instead.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. For drag & drop, movement is sensitive to perspective, but the quickest way (I find) to move pieces is keyboard nudging: arrows, with the shift key moving at 10x speed. For any given perspective, all three axes are available (option up/down gets you the "depth" axis for current perspective).

I mostly model modular buildings, usually with significantly higher brick count than I can afford in real life. One thing I like about BrickSmith is that I can put down a -lot- of bricks efficiently by a mix of:
- Duplicate and move existing bricks.
- Fully keyboard based location and rotation of bricks.
- Useful grids to work with.

BrickSmith's biggest weakness might be that it has no snapping/connectivity, so "off-grid" work is time consuming, nearing the point of being impractical. But if you want to build orthogonally it's very efficient for power users.

cheers
Ben