n00b who can't add a part

[Hamish Woodman]

So I'm a digital Lego newbie getting my head around MLCad, solid piece of work, but I find that part 56145 - a reinforced wheel - doesn't seem to be in the parts list (thought I was being stupid, looked up the part number, ctrl+f says it's really not there). Huh. Do a bit of searching around, and find this: http://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptdetail.cg.../56145.dat

OK... gotcha. I'm feeling more up to speed now. So after gazing over the ReadMe I add 56145.dat to LDraw/parts and the 6 subfiles to LDraw/parts/s... restart MLCad, not there... run mklist and run MLCad... no part. OK... so in MLCad I go FileScan Parts... no new parts found... still no part.

Hm.

Are there any pros out there who know what I'm doing wrong? Would greatly appreciate
a bit of advice! If it changes anything I'm running a 64-bit Win-7 environment.

Thanks in advance.

Hamish.

[Stan Isachenko]

Try to help you.
1. Copy part file to Ldraw\parts
2. Copy all subfiles to Ldraw\parts\s
3. Run Mlcad, then file->Scan Parts
4. Press yes to write new data to file
5. Restart MLCad(no obligatory)
6. Then find you part(by name, or by number)

[Hamish Woodman]

Thank you Stan,

I've done exactly that and MLCad says there's no new data... I may clean install and try again.

Cheers!!!

[Stan Isachenko]

In this topic you can find something useful for you. It is file with parts categories. And here you can download all unofficial parts.

[Hamish Woodman]

Stan you're a knight in Lego armour!

I'll re-install, and put the unofficials in my models folder as per the suggestion.

Thanks again!

[Stan Isachenko]

I think Ldraw is rather difficult solution, and I will write large tutorial, but later. Because when I started I spent a lot of time to understand it. And I think this also will be useful for you)))
LSynth is software for bendable parts. But it have problems with windows 7. I install it but with a lot of problems.

[Hamish Woodman]

I find it makes me a little nostalgic, it's similar in an unforgiving kind of way to software I used to use to make Quake2 levels. Powerful, precise, no room for error.

[Hamish Woodman]

This is really baffling me, did exactly that - this time is said there were new parts, his yes... they're not in there.

Sigh.

[Damien Roux]

Personnaly, I don't have any problem with Lsynth and Window Se7en, works like a charm for me.

So there should be a solution for your problem.

[Hamish Woodman]

Oh, haven't given Lsynth a go yet - don't need bendy pipes in this one.

The problem's with adding parts - I've just now (in my lunch break) re-installed, put the .dats in the right folders, MLCad knows the new parts are there, acknowledges there's new parts when I scan for parts - I rebuild the parts list, and if I open the parts list in notepad it's even in there! But I can't find the part in MLCad, even searching by its part number.

Is there some kind of toggle option to show unauthorised parts that I've missed?

[Orion Pobursky]

If I may intrude here Stan...
What, exactly, is difficult with getting LDraw set up that isn't covered in the Getting Started tutorial? I have a great desire to make this platform more accessible and while I think we've come a long way since I started, I think we still have a long way to go. Also, if you do write a tutorial, please consider doing it over at the LDraw Wiki

[Stan Isachenko]

Orion, yes there are a lot of good tutorials for everything, but I didn't found there answer for "what is Ldraw?". So I understand it by myself, but it took time)

[Hamish Woodman]

I don't know why adding the parts didn't work for me before, but adding ALL the unofficial parts at once did the trick - much obliged!