jamesster

Eurobricks Citizen
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  1. By the way, this may be of interest to y'all - LEGO is still updating and releasing their parts library via Unity packages. The most recent update was less than 2 weeks ago, and there's lots of new parts that could be ported to LDD: Someone I know even found unreleased/unproduced parts from canceled Vidiyo sets in there.
  2. This video was just released today, here's the raw slides: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1028885/What-10-Years-of-Package Of interest here, there's a part of the talk where he shows a public collection of LEGO packages for Unity. This includes some animated LEGO animals/critters, more animated minifig and minidoll samples, and what appears to be a newer or different(?) version of the model importer - I'm not completely sure, but a cursory glance with a file comparison program is showing plenty of models for bricks that I didn't have in my older copy from the microgame. Definitely worth looking into to confirm/deny. Edit - make sure you're on a recent version of Unity to ensure you're getting the most up to date versions of the packages as possible. Latest version of the LEGO Model Importer as of now is 0.10.1, from April 11, not even a couple weeks ago. DEFINITELY has new parts.
  3. Hello all! Me and my partner recently got our hands on a whole bunch of LEGO dealer catalogs. As far as I can tell, none of these particular catalogs have been scanned and put online before - in fact, barely any LEGO dealer catalogs at all have been. So, we've begun the slow process of scanning and uploading them for y'all to read. I think the plan is also to submit them to Brickset's catalog repository. Anyone else can feel free to reupload these scans too or otherwise do what they want; we don't mind. Being aimed at storeowners, rather than consumers, these tend to be a bit more dry than the usual catalogs, but often have information and pictures not seen elsewhere - like details on suggested set prices and wholesale case prices (some of which I think had been lost to time until now?), recommendations and pictures of how to set up aisles and displays, unique set descriptions, occasional pictures of prototype sets and video games, release schedules, and general promotional images/dioramas/etc sometimes not seen elsewhere. The exact formatting and what's included in a dealer catalog changed a lot over time, but there's usually at least something interesting in any of them. Scanning these will be a slow process, and we'll also need to get a bigger scanner to handle quite a few of them, so check back in. I'll update this post as we go. Oh, and there's also a lot of very cool print ads/comics/etc spanning many years I'm including in this post too. SCANNED: Print ads/comics, assorted years 1985 Large US Dacta - The LEGO Educational System - Bricklink entry 1995 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry Not scanned by us, but already available on Brickset and worth checking out: 1982 US Dealer Large - Bricklink entry TO BE SCANNED/UPLOADED: 1979 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 1988 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 1989 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 1990 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 1996 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 1998 Dealer Large US - Bricklink entry 2001 Dealer Catalog German - Bricklink entry 2002 Dealer Large - Bricklink entry (ours is French) 2003 Dealer US Large - Bricklink entry 2004 Dealer Large UK - Bricklink entry 2005 Dealer Large Canadian - Bricklink entry
  4. Nice find! I'm putting out feelers in a few communities for someone who could make the purchase - I'm totally available to cover costs as well.
  5. I'm a fan of software names that just say what they do - could get more specific with it perhaps, honestly even just LDD Brick Editor works fine IMO. I've heard people use the term anti-studs before. While I can't help with French/German, those terms are correct.
  6. jamesster

    Very Surreal Alpha Team Prototype

    Another website, ObscureGamers, got their hands on a bunch of development material from Data Design Interactive/Artworld UK a while back - the company that did LEGO Rock Raiders, and also the pre-rendered cutscenes for many LEGO games, including Alpha Team. Not a whole lot of Alpha Team stuff was found in the lot, but they did find an early script for the intro animation, and some conversation between Digital Domain and Artworld. They're still sorting through the full lot - I've just been watching from the sidelines on Discord. I'm not sure if it'd be ok for me to post it here, since they haven't "officially" released it themselves yet, but Dirk Brick was a character that got cut entirely. The final game had you, the player, as the Alpha Team's chief. But in earlier WIPs of the story, Dirk Brick was apparently the leader of the team - there's even a specific part in a message from Digital Domain/LEGO to Artworld asking him to be cut from the intro FMV, where he appeared on the map screen sending Dash on his mission. I guess I'll come back here and post the script and stuff once it's officially released...? There's some other fun stuff in there - Dash was named Ray and had a ray gun (potentially also named Bolt briefly), but his gun got cut from the game and his role changed to "motion expert". You can still see a trace of this in the final game data where his textures are named LASERHEAD, LASERBODY, etc. Meanwhile, in the final game data, Radia's textures name her Pip, which is also a name that shows up in the early script. Ogel was named Dr. Ogel, too. They also had a whole car chase sequence planned for the intro, which got nipped in the bud pretty quickly (seemingly before any of it was animated)... Cause Artworld didn't really know much about what the new design for the game's characters, environments, and story were like at the time of writing it, so they just shrugged and put in a sequence that was generally spy-themed. Both parties then decided to cut it as it had nothing to do with the actual game. Unfortunately, we don't know what Dirk looked like, or what his role in the game would've been besides appearing in the intro. There is an unknown minifigure in this footage of the LEGO Media office, though, and it'd be roughly from around the time Alpha Team was going through its redesign. Could be Dirk Brick, could be someone else - who knows. Update - I just got my own copy of the GBC manual, and the story section says the Alpha Team solves problems by "deploying wacky devices that have been built out of special LEGO parts". That text can't be found in the PC manual - maaaaybe it's another holdover? It also says "Skeleton Zombies" while the PC game/manual just says Zombies.
  7. Update: https://github.com/Terrev/3DXML-to-OBJ/releases Added the option to group opaque meshes together, while keeping transparent meshes separate for better depth sorting in some programs.
  8. Potentially of interest to this project... LEGO released a Unity toolkit that includes a bunch of official part models we didn't have before:
  9. LEGO and Unity recently co-developed a "microgame"; a tutorial on how to use the Unity editor: It's a pretty cool little intro to gamedev, but it also makes use of some official Unity packages made by LEGO that can import and optimize models. It currently supports .LDR and .LXF/LXFML (but only version 5.6 or higher, which is newer than what the last version of LDD exports, so currently you have to import LDD models into Studio, then re-export as LDR). It has quite a lot of optimization features; too many to screenshot and explain here. You can see some of the menus for them in the pics above. There's even some basic support for snapping pieces directly together in Unity. The brick library contains both "legacy" and "new" parts. These seem to effectively be two brick libraries - the legacy parts are what LDD was using (plus parts it didn't have), with studs and tubes fused to the rest of each brick model. The new parts seem slightly cleaned up, and have studs as separate meshes. The tool is also capable of dynamically adding bevels to all bricks, depending on the LOD setting. Either way, there's a ton of new parts in here, even Duplo elements: I'm not really sure what the rules and limitations are when it comes to using these packages - I think LEGO mostly anticipates them being used along with the Microgame, though you can easily add them to a new project and use them on their own. The included terms of service seem more focused on the Microgame aspect. It's still in beta, so hopefully there's more to come?
  10. Perhaps something else to look into fixing, if it hasn't been already? Simply re-saving the PNGs fixes them not loading. The ones outright mapped to parts incorrectly might take some more poking at.
  11. This is really neat! Would love to see more of this sort of stuff.
  12. I was browsing Brickshelf earlier today when I came across this folder of pics from LEGOLAND Deutschland: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=438680&n=192 Specifically, this image: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=4572402 There's a Blacktron minifigure there with inverted torso colors... I've seen a bootleg torso like that before, though it has some minor differences in the shaping/thickness of some things than the one at LEGOLAND (which seems more accurate to the original print - granted, it's not like bootlegs are known for consistency in quality...). The question is, if it's a bootleg, what's it doing in an official LEGOLAND display? Or is it legit, somehow...? There's also a face towards the upper right in this photo that doesn't look quite like any official print I recognize (the one with the blush): http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=4572400 A lot of the minifigures in these pictures are rather jumbled, anyway... Some of the prints are even worn down. Maybe it was somebody's collection that somehow ended up at LEGOLAND, and some knockoffs snuck in? I dunno. Just a curiosity. A torso like that would be pretty neat...
  13. Which method are you referring to? If you mean 3DXML captures, that's more useful for entire models than individual pieces - it still works fine on Windows 10 (I'm not aware of any method that doesn't, actually), and the software is still available via the web archives; see this topic. When it comes to converting pieces from G files directly - which is what you're gonna want for porting parts to LDraw/stud.io, it's far more convenient than manually capturing each piece as a 3DXML - see the topic I linked in my previous post (other folks have their own converters, as well, mine's just one of them):
  14. People have been using various methods to port LDD bricks over to the LDraw library for quite a long time, and as far as I know, stud.io uses the LDraw library and thus almost certainly already has some LDD pieces in it (see the second half of this post; as of 2017 the LDraw parts library credited LDD in 542 parts files) - so yeah, definitely possible. There's a few options for directly converting the entire LDD brick library to OBJ (here's my tool for it), though of course there's still the task of turning those OBJs into proper LDraw/stud.io bricks. But, yes, should be totally possible.