Subject:
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LDraw & TLC (was: Re: LEGO Company Welcomes Adult LEGO Enthusiasts)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Thu, 1 Mar 2001 07:34:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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8828 times
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[revisiting an old thread]
On December 6, 2000, in lugnet.lego.direct, Todd Lehman wrote:
> In lugnet.lego.direct, Fredrik Glöckner writes:
> > Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but I would be surprised if the provided
> > software would be useful for much more than composing a model from a
> > selected subset of LEGO parts and the submitting this to buy the parts
> > needed. With some luck there will be a file format visible to the end
> > user which can be reverse engineered.
>
> There's a strong chance that a mutually beneficial relationship between
> L-CAD developers and TLC may emerge. LEGO is keeping a very open mind
> about new data formats.
This is kinda what I meant:
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2000/12/000020.html
> My sense is that they not only want to be able
> to import LDraw .DAT files someday (either natively or via an external
> conversion process) but that they also understand the benefits of open-
> architecture file formats. I suspect what they are likely to do with
> their proprietary modeling language is similar to what Adobe did with
> PostScript: publish detailed syntactical and semantical specifications
> of the language while retaining ownership of the language itself. Even
> though the format is still proprietary, third-party tools thrive. Open-
> architecture text-based file formats are beautiful flowers. Closed-
> architecture binary file formats are poisonous weeds. I'm pretty sure
> LEGO understands this and won't risk a mis-step.
Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that LEGO's own proprietary modeling
format will necessarily be text-based. Naturally, I think it would be
totally lame if it wasn't, but I don't want that to sound like I'm dead-set
convinced that a text-based format is what they'll ultimately decide to go
with. I hope to God that they do, but all I know for sure is that we
"extolled the virtues" of text-based formats (vis-a-vis LEGO & CAD) to
Brad J. & Torben S. in November and there was a lot of nodding.
Now if LEGO would choose some kind of SGML- or XML-based format, then --
hoohoo -- happy day. :)
--Todd (not under NDA)
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