New Instructions vs Old Instructions

[JunkstyleGio]

Why did we finish the instructions?

The answer is simple: because we wanted to! And therefore i think the instructions in those days were much more fun.

[hoeij]

Well I think the general consensus here was that there should be a happy medium between the old-style and new-style.

I for one am not advocating that we have more of this sort of thing: (image of 8862)

I also don't want to have a single step for just placing a pin.

The page of the 8862 instructions you showed, if that were split up over several pages, I don't see how it would make the building process any faster (or easier for that matter, even though it's just one page it does show pretty clearly which parts to use, and where they're supposed to go).

[rgbrown]

The instructions should be easy enough that the youngest person who is capable of building the model can follow the instructions. What's the point in making the instructions so hard that someone who was otherwise capable of building the model, was defeated by them? And if you make a mistake in a studless model, they are REALLY hard to undo.

Sure, the ideal instructions for AFOLs/TFOLs would be much more abbreviated, but that's not who the instructions are pitched at. I mean, AFOLs just need a couple of pictures of the final product, right?

I think PDF (or similar) instructions are OK - laptops are getting more portable, and I can imagine building from a pdf on an iPad for example would be pretty enjoyable. I have a tablet which folds flat, and building B-models from that is absolutely fine. I think the pdfs have a few quality issues, but that's a solvable technical problem. Fast forward a few years and I think this problem becomes a non-issue.

Right now though, when a number of people don't have laptops, it's different. Building from a desktop PC would be nasty. Perhaps it should be possible to order hard copies of B-model instructions if desired. I would happily purchase the 8043 B-model instructions, for example.

Interactive 3D instructions! I shudder at the thought.

[hoeij]

Printed instructions for the B model should be available to those that want to pay a little extra.

I don't think I'd pay extra for the instructions because they read fine on my laptop. If my computer were a desktop, then I probably would want to pay extra for the instructions.

[Jetro]

Actually I'm not at all happy with the image quality of the PDF files. The renderings are blocky and colours are even poorer then in the printed instructions (black/dark grey differences especially). If alternate models must be downloaded I'd like to get better quality PDFs.

[Blakbird]

Actually I'm not at all happy with the image quality of the PDF files. The renderings are blocky and colours are even poorer then in the printed instructions (black/dark grey differences especially). If alternate models must be downloaded I'd like to get better quality PDFs.

The quality of the PDFs is only bad because they choose to make it bad. All of the PDFs for instructions in modern years are just crappy raster scans of the printed instructions. So LEGO starts with a digital CAD file of instructions in Maya, prints those instructions which causes a loss of quality and color saturation, then scans the print which causes another loss of quality, then compresses the massive scanned file to make it reasonably downloadable. Incredibly inefficient. In days of yore, they used to create a vector PDF file directly from the instructions source file. These looked awesome and were actually smaller files. See the link below for an example. I don't know why they don't do them all this way, but they may not actually want people to have a very high quality file that could be sold or used to print instructions as good or better than LEGO produces.

Set 2129 Instructions

[rgbrown]

In days of yore, they used to create a vector PDF file directly from the instructions source file. These looked awesome and were actually smaller files. See the link below for an example. I don't know why they don't do them all this way, but they may not actually want people to have a very high quality file that could be sold or used to print instructions as good or better than LEGO produces.

Yeah, this is really frustrating. Surely that is not the reason though ...

I hadn't realised they used to do vector pdfs. Do you have pdf instructions of that sort for a big model? I would guess that for something like 8258, a vector pdf might start being a little slow to render in a pdf viewer, and might start being pretty big. Even with raster images though, I'm sure they could do better than they currently do ...

Another minor IT-related pet peeve (but which I find unreasonably irritating). Why do they only produce wallpapers in 4:3 aspect ratio? And why doesn't the designer blog have an RSS feed?

OK, I'll stop now

[Blakbird]

I hadn't realised they used to do vector pdfs. Do you have pdf instructions of that sort for a big model? I would guess that for something like 8258, a vector pdf might start being a little slow to render in a pdf viewer, and might start being pretty big. Even with raster images though, I'm sure they could do better than they currently do ...

I don't have a list of which are vector and which are raster, but NONE of the last several years have been vector. 8456 is an example of a reasonably large set that was vector.

[rgbrown]

I don't have a list of which are vector and which are raster, but NONE of the last several years have been vector. 8456 is an example of a reasonably large set that was vector.

OK, weighing in at 27.5MB, that is possibly the reason why they changed mode. But that reason is becoming less relevant these days. (only took me 30 seconds to download). And on my low-powered laptop, there are no rendering speed issues

Edit: nice new avatar, by the way

Edited September 24, 2010 by rgbrown

[Blakbird]

OK, weighing in at 27.5MB, that is possibly the reason why they changed mode. But that reason is becoming less relevant these days. (only took me 30 seconds to download). And on my low-powered laptop, there are no rendering speed issues

Also keep in mind that this is an 84 page instruction book for 3 different models, so most new model files wouldn't be much bigger. Even less so when you consider that LEGO breaks them into multiple books and therefore multiple files.

Edit: nice new avatar, by the way

Thanks!

[phool]

Printed instructions for the B model should be available to those that want to pay a little extra.

I don't think I'd pay extra for the instructions because they read fine on my laptop. If my computer were a desktop, then I probably would want to pay extra for the instructions.

IMHO we are already paying a premium for these products. Accordingly we should get a premium experience, including printed b-model instructions, without having to pay extra.

[grepin]

My preferred instructions were the ones from the mid-90's. They were far better than the extremely dumbed down versions we have today.

IMHO we are already paying a premium for these products. Accordingly we should get a premium experience, including printed b-model instructions, without having to pay extra.

Agreed, but then again I'm not completely against not having alternate model instructions printed by default - for the environmental concerns, and to use the cost savings on improving the models themselves.

As some suggested here, perhaps the alternate instructions could be made available on demand at a small cost for those who don't like the downloadable versions.

[Jetro]

I hadn't realised they used to do vector pdfs...

Another minor IT-related pet peeve (but which I find unreasonably irritating). Why do they only produce wallpapers in 4:3 aspect ratio? And why doesn't the designer blog have an RSS feed?

I sometimes get the feeling LEGO is one of those companies where website development is done by people who can do fancy stuff but don't live in the real world. Take the Technic pages. Very flashy and all, but I absolutely loath websites that play music and videos without asking your permission - you are quietly surfing the internet and suddenly from one of your 10 open tabs an unexpected noise turns up (this has actually ben changed and now you have to start the video, except on the video page). Then a blog which isn't a blog - terribly hard to keep track of and the more so because it is updated and highly infrequent intervals + tucked away at a very inaccessible place inside the whole Technic division.

Blakbirds explanation about why vector PDFs are no longer available may have a point though - they may not want to make it even easier for the chinese pirate cloners to copy LEGOs products.

[rgbrown]

Take the Technic pages. Very flashy and all, but I absolutely loath websites that play music and videos without asking your permission - you are quietly surfing the internet and suddenly from one of your 10 open tabs an unexpected noise turns up

Yes, the power functions webpage has made me jump out of my skin before. While trying to browse surreptitiously when I was supposed to be working

Blakbirds explanation about why vector PDFs are no longer available may have a point though - they may not want to make it even easier for the chinese pirate cloners to copy LEGOs products.

Well, I don't think that would make much difference ... cloners can still easily build the model from a lousy pdf, and there are plenty of CAD libraries of LEGO parts. I reckon it's purely a file size decision.