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In lugnet.cad, Tore Eriksson wrote:
> There is a discussion in the Lugnet group at facebook on the fact that people
> leave Lugnet.com in favour for other, often theme specialized sites. Questions
> like "Why is it so and what can be done to get people back to Lugnet?" are
> discussed.
>
> Some say the just CAD related discussions there at Lugnet nowadays, and yes
> they're quite right. But even that activity has decreased a lot IMO. The few
> posts there may be read hundreds of times, but responses are few and from very
> few people. While theme geeks may have moved to theme specific sites, were have
> LDrawers moved? Away from LCad I'm afraid? And, worst of all, aren't there any
> new people joining? Or is there some new, large and vivid LDraw discussion forum
> that I'm unaware of? LCad is such a great thing, but do we attract new
> enthusiasts, or are we even scaring them away somehow?
>
> People complain about Lugnet.com being outdated and stone age and inconvenient
> to access and participate in. I don't agree on that, but that doesn't help
> Lugnet. And I think it's closer to the truth if it has been LDraw.org described
> that way. I have never found LDraw.org attractive or easy to navigate, or even
> to access.
>
> What do you think?
>
> /Tore
There are plenty of people still using LDraw and plenty of newcomers to it.In
some ways I think it's a victim of its own success. The software is well
developed and easy to use and the parts library is vast and easy to install. As
such people don't always need to ask as much about getting stuff to work.
I still get questions about it over on flickr but they are mostly PMed to me
directly. Without wishing to get into the LUGNET/not LUGNET debate I think you
might find more discussion with a dedicated and easy to join web forum. A lot of
the current userbase will not be members or frequenters of LUGNET but they may
join a dedicated LDraw forum to ask questions about troubles etc.
Tim
PS. And I agree about LDraw.org. You think it's hard to navigate from the front
end? Try it from behind the door ;) When Orion gets time to convert to a new CMS
I hope it will all be much easier for all involved.
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>
> There are plenty of people still using LDraw and plenty of newcomers to it.In
> some ways I think it's a victim of its own success. The software is well
> developed and easy to use and the parts library is vast and easy to install. As
> such people don't always need to ask as much about getting stuff to work.
I've been using LDraw for about 8 months now (as a very casual user), and it's
taken quite a while to get into it. I'm mainly using MLCAD to create/edit models
and using POV-Ray to render stuff. Here's my take on it...
I think the key thing is that people need to keep adding new parts to the parts
library. Without the parts you can't create the models..etc..etc
It seems like Lego are churning out new parts everyday, so it's hard to keep up.
Is there a way of working out the number of sets that are dependent on a
particular part? The creation of critical missing parts could then be
prioritised.
From my experience, it seems that most Lego rendering is done using POV-Ray
(there seem to be more tools to support this process). From my experiments, I've
tried to convert models into other 3D formats, but the tools to do this seem to
be quite limited (e.g. 3DWin5 and Ldr2Dat2Dxf). If we could somehow open up the
modelling/rendering process so that's it's easier for users of other 3D tools to
manipulate and render stuff, then I think that would benefit everyone.
(BTW, you can download some Lego models in various 3D formats from my website
http://www.pearse.co.uk/lego)
As a final thought, I think it would be great to create an open source 3D Lego
game as an LDraw community project. Perhaps something like Blenders Game Engine
could be used to do something like this?
For info on the Blender Game Engine see the following link:
http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/game-engine/
Bye for now
Reuben
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