Subject:
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Feature requests for LDraw/LEdit v. 2
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Fri, 12 Mar 1999 07:11:40 GMT
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Viewed:
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944 times
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Here are 5 ideas of mine (although I don't claim to be the first to have
thought of them) for an upcoming LDraw/LEdit package, in what is most
likely to be increasing order of difficulty to implement.
1) Support for a "virtual filesystem" such as what can be found in a
.tgz file. This is especially useful for the parts directory.
2) I can quite easily envision models where parts of the instructions
would best be illustrated from one particular view, while other parts of
the instructions would best be illustrated from certain other views.
The ability to force particular views for particular steps during
instruction display would be beneficial.
3) For LEdit, mouse positioning of new pieces. Although the mouse is
only 2D and the piece needs to be moved 3D, this can be gotten around to
a large extent in isometric 3D views by adjusting the third "in-out"
dimension based upon the presence of pieces already placed, and sort of
"snap-to" the model being worked on where the 2D cursor happens to be.
(Does that make any sense?)
4) Another LEdit feeping creaturism... on-the-fly rotation of the
model. I'm thinking something like arcball here. (I especially like
SGI's implementation of 3D display software whereby you can set a model
spinning and it keeps going after you release the mouse button... But I
digress.)
And now for the real doozy...
5) A revamped part specification. A part should be allowed to have
truly curved surfaces... not just linear approximations thereof. Say,
bezier patches? Further, to simplify the definition of some parts, it
should be possible to define them in a form of programming language
which supports variable-controlled loops (including nested loops), and
the ability to specify 3D points as functions of variables. Practical
built-in functions like sqrt, sin, cos, tan, abs, etc should be
available in the language as convience functions. Part pieces required
by a model could be "compiled" into ram, and then executed as many times
as needed (In many ways, I would imagine that such a language would
resemble Knuth's MetaFont).
The implementation of #5 would render many existing part files obsolete
since they could probably be respecified much more efficiently. The
new system should, of course, still be able to parse old part files and
work with them normally, or, at worst, there should be some sort of
conversion utility.
Am I asking too much? :)
> > Mark
(Shall I get my asbestos suit on for response to this? :)
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Feature requests for LDraw/LEdit v. 2
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| A few more ideas... 1. A little more rendering, so the parts look more realistic(not pov-ray quality, but so it looks great) 2. parts that automatically move(such as a continuosly waving hand on a mimifig) Basically, I'm trying to make this like (...) (26 years ago, 12-Mar-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
| | | Re: Feature requests for LDraw/LEdit v. 2
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| (...) Good idea. To solve the 2d problem, you could have it hold down the primary (generally left) mouse button to move the piece left, right, forward, and back, and then hold the secondary (generally right) button to move it up and down in a (...) (26 years ago, 12-Mar-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
| | | Re: Feature requests for LDraw/LEdit v. 2 [DAT]
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| (...) Yes, that would be useful. It's also absurd that an application would need to worry about that, since Linux can do that at the OS level. But, I havn't ported to Linux yet, so I don't have much room to complain. (...) A meta command to change (...) (26 years ago, 13-Mar-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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