gaming from a digital ldcad world

[SNIPE]

Hi,

I was watching videos abouy LDcad and noticed that it can handle editing and displaying files which contain hundreds of thousands of bricks. There are also no missing lego pieces in the combined official and unofficial parts libraries.

So this means that I could build a a fairly lerge lego city especially with my good PC hardware specs. So I learned how to use it and it is indeed very cool.

The only thing that is missing which would be really cool is to be able to walk around virtually in the created lego city. Now I understand that this is not what LDcad is intendes for, but was wondering if it's possible at all.

I know that LDcad has an animations tool but this is probably not up to par for doing this. If only lego worlds supported SNOT building, fine parts rotation rather than just 90 degrees, and had all parts available..

Maybe there's another way to do this despite some skeptisism?

Edited July 3, 2017 by SNIPE

[JGuy]

You can export LDCad files to .obj I believe (if not this, .3ds probably).  You can import those into a program called Blender, an animation program.  You can make an animation with the camera, or you can actually use Blender's built-in game engine to control a character or camera inside the city.  (however for that you would need to watch some tutorials.  Here's a playlist of how to use the game engine: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLda3VoSoc_TSS7ht07sCt8zDCyAenOG6i

 

 

[roland]

I actually have been thinking about this and was planning to add some sort of (scripted) interaction in 1.7 but the current rendering engine is not really suited for it (Z-Fighting problems, no frustum culling etc).

Technically you could do a walk-trough using animation script, but you would need to enter the static camera movements by supplying numbers. And depending on the size of the model the resulting animation might have a very low fps unless you export it to png's or POV-Ray.

For this reason and some others I started working on a whole new LDraw rendering engine whom might be able to do real time game like things much better. This project might result in LDCad 2.0 or a viewer only not sure about that.

Edited July 3, 2017 by roland

[SylvainLS]

4 hours ago, SNIPE said:

There are also no missing lego pieces in the combined official and unofficial parts libraries.

Actually, there’re at least about 1000 parts that exist and are not present in LDraw Official and Unofficial Libraries. They are present in LDD and on digital-bricks.de (but they need work!). And I won’t even talk about decors/patterns.

There’s a lot of work to do yet! What are you all waiting to join? 

Edited July 3, 2017 by SylvainLS