Just now I’m getting around to skimming the various thoughts about “the future of LDraw.” Having spent a bit of time thinking over related issues while wishing I could practically contribute, here are my thoughts.

Please take these as constructive observations from a perpetual student of what works on the web. For the sake of time I’m going to be terse, however I’m certainly not telling anyone what to do. Rather, I’m succinctly outlining suggestions based both on history with the LDraw and LEGO community and my digital strategy, community development and marketing career.

So, please take my words as coming from an attiude of the utmost respect for your and others’ tireless efforts, and also from a desire to add some constructive ideas. :-)

It’s plainly evident LUGNET is no longer an adequate place for official discussion of LDraw. With new users not being able to sign up, and with lack of administrative support, not to mention functional but seriously dated technology, it simply is not sustainable. Now that people are using Flickr, Brothers Brick, Facebook, and other sites to have this discussion, it’s time to look elsewhere.

It’s encouraging to see Orion’s plan to migrate LDraw.org to a new CMS. The team has done an outstanding job with what we have, though migration is long overdue. Is there any way for this to happen sooner? I’ll understand if no, but just asking. :-)

My hope is that there’s a designer and usability architect among LDraw’s fans that’s equally as talented in his own field as Orion and you (Tim) are with administrating the web site, to re-present (vs. represent) LDraw and bring the site up to the expectations of today’s savvy Internet users. I’ve long felt that the lack of focus and clear, concise calls to action on LDraw.org have been responsible for a lot of unconverted interest. I believe an equal emphasis into design, usability, and involving users in a functional discussion community would breathe new life into LDraw.

Whatever new CMS is selected (I’m assuming Joomla or Drupal), I imagine the discussion system will be robust (or a more robust plugin can be found). Also, think about integration with popular social sites. On the web today, it’s easier to find and engage users where they already are online; we know that Facebook is nudging out Google for the most traffic, and we know there’s a vibrant LEGO community on Flickr. Those can become the new outposts to attract people to LDraw and to aggregate conversations about LDraw. Further, actively encourage use of an #LDraw Twitter hashtag.

If Flickr and Facebook’s APIs have the ability to pull out discussions (they may not, I haven’t looked), then find ways to aggregate or at least display that discussion on the new CMS site. For blogs, consider using a popular comment community like Disqus or Intense Debate to thread comments across sites.

It’s impressive that this system and user community has survived as long as it has solely on the volunteer efforts of passionate fans. In the now years it’s been since my active involvement, I’ve gained even more respect for the persistence of people like Orion, Willy, and Tim. I’m hopeful that the LDraw community will successfully re-invent itself and see new life with many more people playing with and sharing virtually-built LEGO models.

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Tangental note:

One thing I’ve seen work successfully for innovation is the concept of Hackathons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon). We’ve been doing more and more of these from a competitive perspective in the Chicago technology community and I’ve seen the energy that comes out of Hackathons in other places such as iPhoneDevCamp in Sunnyvale. Facebook also holds internal hackathons out of which tremendous innovation for the site has emerged (watch the first video here: http://www.facebook.com/careers/life.php). At SXSW in Austin last week, I attended a session by some tech community leaders in Philadelphia who used a hackathon to build the web site that is now campaigning for Google fiber investment in their community, yielding a finished product (strategy, design, web site) in a single day. (If you are interested, please write me for detailed notes from this talk).

Realizing that the LDraw admins and users live all over the globe, having such an in-person purpose-driven meeting would be difficult. However, if there were a concentration of talented LDrawheads (and one admin) in an area who could get together for a day or two, that could be a reality. Alternatively, something like this could be organized over video chat. A leader like Tim or Orion could set a goal to accomplish something over a weekend, and solicit people to collaborate live until it was finished. The group could discuss in realtime and take bite-sized chunks, iterating until new resources and features were functional.

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Just throwing some constructive ideas out there. I hope you find my words encouraging and of value.

Tim

It is fun to use if you have an idea and want to test some ideas out before going onto BrickLink to order the pieces needed, or to throw around ideas without needing to dump out your entire collection onto the floor.

I first downloaded it because a friend asked me to build a Droid cellphone dock for him, based on pictures, and then order pieces off of BrickLink, but I had been wanting to download it before then just so I could have a digital LEGO builder. I’ve fooled around a little, testing out designs for spaceships, but nothing serious.

I still do not know my way around everything, like keyboard hotkeys (if there even are any), but I bet once I look up more information I’ll have things figured out.

/Tore

If you ask me, yes without a doubt! Have a look at the LCad joint project Datsville:
http://www.lugnet.com/cad/datsville/
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=188200221436
It’s the first rule* that the models submitted to this project are MOCs, but nowhere is it stated that these MOCs have to be built IRL before submitting to Datsville.
*) This rule has unfortunately been violated without being discovered in time. Therefor we are looking for a new train, this time a real MOC, and repainting the gas station in order to make it brand neutral.

The main reasons are for documenting my builds, creating an idea without having the right brick on hand and create a part list so I know what I need to order.

Personally I think it is a great reference tool. There are many cad models posted on Mocpages. Is a cad lego moc (with no real lego moc to follow) considered a true moc?

I didn’t like it. When I build, I usually go through a lot of attempts at getting something “just right” and with my collection, I can play around, try it from different angles, or maybe scrap an entire section for a quick rebuild…all sorts of things that take too long in program.

As some others have said, my time is limited, and if I can spare a moment, I will break out the actual brick.

Only recently, I picked up this hobby again. I rebuilt the old sets from my childhood, bought the 4997 Transport Ferry set, and found out about DesignByMe and LDD. I designed a 1843-part globe in LDD which is currently being hand-picked for me. But for making building instructions, I turned to LDraw again. This time around with MLCAD as front end, which I think is a great tool (but why is there no Undo?)

I think the biggest compliment for LDraw is that LDD features an export function to .ldr, which I gratefully used a lot. It was great to see that the Parts Tracker still exists after all these years, and I hope to use LDraw/MLCAD a lot in the future.

In the very near future, it will have a much more interactive application, but that’s all I can say about that right now.

1) Have you ever heard of LDraw? And if you have do you know what it is? Have you ever considered using it but decided against it? If so why? Did you know the parts are all designed by volunteers?

Yes, I have heard of L-Draw and use it quite a bit. I have it installed on both my laptop and my desktop and own both reference books that cover the software. I try to visit L-Draw.org every couple months to see what has been updated and to keep up on the parts list.

2) If you are a user I’d really like to know what you use LDraw for? Do you use it to document old models? To make instructions? To make nice pictures? To make things you don’t have the bricks for? To design models you later build in bricks? Other reasons?

I use L-Draw mainly when I don’t have access to my physical bricks and want to build. I travel a lot for my job so I often find myself with time on the road where I need to relax for a bit. Sometimes I play video games on my DSi, but often I find myself turning to L-draw to document new concepts or just as an outlet for my creativity. Occasionally, I will also document old LEGO sets for the Bluebrick software or do building instructions for some of my MOC’s if the mood strikes me.

I prefer L-Draw/MLCAD over LDD any day! I think that’s mainly because I started by using L-Draw/MLCAD back in 2003. I just haven’t given LDD a fair trial as L-Draw/MLCAD fills all of my needs at this time.

- Design anything my imagination desires with no parts on hand
- Export a parts list for that creation
- Import that parts list into BrinkLink
- Order all the parts
- Build my creation, referring back to my design

That elegant process is much more difficult and time consuming without LDraw in the loop.

LDraw is also an invaluable experimentation tool. While designing a SHiP, I wanted to try some exotic structural ideas, but had no idea if they were practical. With LDraw I could easily mock it up, check piece counts, deduce weight and size, estimate costs, and get the shape right without shelling out hundreds of dollars for pieces upfront for ideas that might not have worked.

So in short, I’m incredibly grateful LDraw and the hardworking community around it exists. I’d like to make note of BrickSmith as well- without that I might still be in my dark age.

My use of LDraw centres around my Alpha Company Forums pet project, where members are encouraged to build official models of various military vehicles relevant to the canon. The designs are solicited from some of the best LEGO Military builders like Chandler Parker, Carter Baldwin and Aleksander Engvoll, so that newbies can quickly learn from new skills from studying those builders’ works.

In particular, the CAD model attributed to me in this post was based on a physical model originally made by Aleks – he helped prepare all the disassembly images from which I recreated the CAD version for.

I was also inspired by Jim “anoved” DeVona’s to turn these official models into building instruction PDFs.

I would tend to think that virtual and physical Lego go hand-in-hand with each other – a skilled user can use the software to quickly verify some aspects of a design before committing to real parts, or explore different variants.

Actually that vaguely fits with my observations although it hadn’t occurred to me (I get most of my parts from the Parts Tracker as I need them). The change in license was slow and tedious for the end users but now that it is done we can finally get both the parts AND software in a single package which is very useful. Previously this was illegal.

These days I use it mostly as a place to try out ideas for things that I may not yet have the parts for. If the idea is workable, it gives me a shopping list of parts to look for on Bricklink. I can also try out different color schemes without investing in tons of parts.

Personally, I think that usage of LDraw started to die out at about the same time that parts updates stopped coming in regular intervals. For those of us who aren’t into the programming/parts authoring aspect, those updates were something to look forward to.

Now that parts updates are starting to come again, I think users will continue to use LDraw. It’s much less limited than LDD, and additional software by the fan community makes it a great tool (though I will admit as an end user that I often struggle trying to get programs to work together).