Subject:
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Proposal for MLCad.ini Enhancements
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:06:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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2547 times
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In the course of writing a minifigure generator for my Bricksmith program, I’ve
really come to appreciate how nifty it is to have something like the MLCad.ini
file to work with. I’ve very grateful to the people who designed and maintain
it. However, I’ve also become aware of some limitations in its data. I hereby
propose these limitations be addressed by extending MLCad.ini as follows:
- Each neck accessory shall record the height by which it should raise the head
- Each torso shall record the angle by which its accompanying arms must be rotated to attach to it
- The <flags> field shall be defined as a comma-separated list to accommodate these and future enhancements
The neck-accessory problem is obvious in the current version of MLCad, which
makes the overly-simplistic assumption that each neckpiece raises the head by
the same amount. This is of course not true. For instance, the Majisto’s Beard
part should not elevate the head at all, while the airtanks should raise it 4
units. My current solution is to ask the user to enter the head elevation, but
really, why should that be the user’s responsibility?
The torso problem
arises when using the Minifig Mechanical Torso, for which the mechanical arms
should be rotated zero degrees to attach correctly. Of course, a standard torso
requires arms to be rotated (0, 0, +/- 9.791) degrees. Applying this rotation
carte-blanche to the mechanical arms leads to unpleasant results.
Since
someone already had the foresight to put in an extra field “reserved for future
use,” these changes should be relatively easy to accommodate. For instance, the
airtanks line would now read:
”Airtanks” “3838.DAT” 4 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0
-2 0
;notice the number “4”, indicating a height of 4 units
and the torso
lines would now read something like:
”Yellow Futuron
Pattern” “973P6E.DAT” 9.791 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
”Mechanical
Torso” “30375.DAT” 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 40 0
;the Futuron torso is
marked with 9.791 for the rotation, while the Mechanical Torso has a 0 in the
same field
The minifigure generator I am writing would benefit greatly from
the adoption of these changes.
Allen Smith
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