Subject:
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Re: Purpose of physical colour parts
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:12:29 GMT
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Viewed:
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8360 times
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In lugnet.cad, Michael Heidemann wrote:
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In lugnet.cad, Santeri Piippo wrote:
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What are the physical colour parts such as
this one
for? Wouldn’t it be more disk-space saving to rather have a list of coloured
part numbers? I have my hands on quite a lot of them through building
instructions, and I think that if one made a physical colour part of each
one of them the PT would be soon cluttered up by them.
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We had discussion about this several times (Please search Lugnet).
Because TLG uses these days the colored numbers in the instructions, we try
to bring also this number to the user. The AIOI lets you choose to install
these parts or not.
I hope this answers your question.
cu
mikeheide
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Unfortunately, I missed this discussion and haven’t stumbled on the magic search
phrase to dig it up again.
It strikes me that creating hard-colored parts for every part/color permutation
Lego ever has or ever will produce has a number of drawbacks:
- It’s duplicative. Linetype 0 has a color component to solve this problem for all past, present, future, and even non-existent combinations.
- It dramatically decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on the part tracker at a time when LDraw output is already moribund.
- It will clog the LDraw library with tens of thousands of utterly redundant “parts.”
- Physical-colored parts are not versatile in actual modeling.
Those are stacked against a single positive:
- They match one of Lego’s internal part database keys.
I think the drawbacks outweigh that one lonely positive by a large margin,
especially since that one positive could have been reproduced with a simple
lookup table—if it was even important to begin with.
Furthermore, the notion that the drawbacks of hard-colored parts will disappear
just by having a checkbox in a Windows-proprietary installer is also severely
problematic:
- LDraw cannot have “optional components” and still maintain any claim to be a common interchange format. Either everybody has the same LDraw, or we give up on the idea of sharing models.
- Installer option or no, maintaining and certifying all these needless parts is a bit like setting a horde of leaches on a hemorrhage patient. LDraw has produced no creative output in the last three years; must we really clog the arteries even more?
- The LDraw library should not be distributed solely via a proprietary installer!
I would like to see LDraw return to its heritage of enabling the creation of
cool new virtual creations by regaining its focus on delivering actual new part
files to its users. While LDraw has hardly been inactive, it also hasn’t been
following its core purpose in years. Hard-colors parts are just another
distraction from that mission.
Allen
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Purpose of physical colour parts
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| (...) Amen! Preach it Brother Allen! I agree with you on all fronts. In the good news department - a part I first submitted 3 1/2 years ago (40375) finally got certified this weekend. But the pace of output for this stuff in painfully slow, and (...) (16 years ago, 13-Apr-09, to lugnet.cad)
| | | Re: Purpose of physical colour parts [DAT]
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| (...) Allen, I agree with you and would go a step further: I cannot see any benefit to have alias parts for transparent and opaque parts, but all this is the territory of the PT admins and I'm not going to mess around in their corner of the sandbox. (...) (16 years ago, 13-Apr-09, to lugnet.cad)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Purpose of physical colour parts
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| (...) We had discussion about this several times (Please search Lugnet). Because TLG uses these days the colored numbers in the instructions, we try to bring also this number to the user. The AIOI lets you choose to install these parts or not. I (...) (16 years ago, 11-Apr-09, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
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