Subject:
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RE: LDraw History - here's one for the old timers in the group....
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
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Date:
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Fri, 12 Oct 2001 18:50:57 GMT
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Reply-To:
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<BRAM@POnospam.CWRU.EDU>
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Viewed:
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438 times
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Wow this is long...
Tim Courtney writes:
> - New developments and ideas which came up in discussion over time
In late 1996 or early 1997, I asked James if he wanted to collaborate with
me on a tutorial for a ThinkQuest entry. Turned out he was ineligible since
he was 25 years old. He mentioned "Tim" as a possible partner, but I had no
clue who Tim was. So instead I asked Tom Burger, a member of the L-CAD list
at that time. Nothing ever came of that. The next school year (1997-1998),
I decided that my contribution to the late JJ would be to complete that
tutorial. By that time, I knew Tim Courtney, and so I asked if he wanted to
be part of the "team". I remember finishing up the last bits of the
proposal the night before the deadline in February 98. Later, we discussed
aspects of the site in May, and then I went on vacation. When I returned,
Tim had decided to, er, bail on me ;) So I finished the tutorial by myself
and it went public September 6, 1998. (and promptly won CLSOTW) Although it
didn't win anything from ThinkQuest, it did receive lots of praise from the
RTL community.
> - New software utilities and the people who wrote them
Let's see...from earliest to most recent, here are a few:
LDraw (originally used to generate images for JJ's set inventories. I think
one of the first MOC's to be LDraw (by James) was Todd Lehman's little
blacktron ship. At that time, some detail was left off of parts, such as
the hollow portions on inverse slopes.)
LEdit (began with 3 parts...2x2, 2x3, and 2x4 bricks. There was no 3D view,
and parts didn't erase when you moved them. Later, more parts were added,
organized by size. The 3D default view was added. Later, a Turn menu was
added to turn the parts around other axes (besides 90 degrees around y).
My 386 was too slow to run LEdit when it first started getting fancier, so
my first LDraw model (a 20 story skyscraper) was entirely typed by hand in
MS-DOS Edit. It took 20 minutes to render a single story in LDraw. By the
time I got to the roof, I had a 486 to work with, so I finished it in LEdit.
Unfortunately, I was unfamiliar with the concept of submodels at the time,
so every time I added a story, I copy and pasted a whole section and then
locally searched and replaced the y values.)
SimLego (Tore's LCAD program to which he at one pointed added a DAT output)
LDrawLauncher (Tore's (I think?) shell for LDraw, since we all hated typing
in the long command lines to get different views. I used this for a long
time since LDAO didn't run on Win 3.x)
LDraw-AddOn (Steve Bliss's "masterpiece". This shell grew and changed so
much over the months/years...I think I'll let Steve give it's history)
LDLite (Paul Gyugyi's (sp?) replacement renderer for LDraw. Originally, the
goal was for a faster, windows compatible renderer. It worked great when
interfaced with LDAO to provide the command line input. It became much more
than that as menus (such as File > Open!) were added, as well as menus for
orientation and *shading*! Later, Paul created extra META commands to make
transformations more versatile and modifiable.
LeoCad belongs somewhere in there too. I'll let Leo talk about that though.
> - Events where LDraw was demonstrated
I think you covered these pretty well.
> - Important decisions regarding the file format and the useage of LDraw
The DAT format hasn't really changed since James came up with it. The
naming conventions have changed at least once. Most of the other additions
came from Paul and can be found by reading the version history of LDLite.
And then there's the whole BFC discussion...and licensing...and the JW
affair...
> - People
The names that stand out from early LCAD development (I have left people out
for the sake of brevity), IMO, are:
James Jessiman (of course)
Tore Erikkson (I think Tore was the first person to make an LDraw part (and
a primitive) other than James.
Steve Bliss (LDAO)
Paul Gyugyi (LDLite)
> - Anything else that would be cool to put in a timeline!
I think the LCAD list came before MFWT, not after. I know I was subscribed
to both at some point.
At some point, there were duplicate discussions on lugnet.cad and the LCad
listserv. There was a lot of discussion about unifying the two.
Eventually, Todd created lugnet.cad.dev and linked the list to cad.dev...and
the listserv died.
--Bram
Bram Lambrecht
bram@cwru.edu
http://bldesign.org/
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