That Lego Chap

It's a good way to add a bit of extra interest to a familiar build. I rebuild my Winter Village collection each Christmas, and last year did exactly that. Santa's Workshop (10245) requires the substitution of a handed white 3x2 triangular plate, but it's a common enough part. WVTS (10259) will also require a couple of white triangular plates. Another idea along similar lines is to pick any of the modular buildings, and use 1x2 & 1x1 plates in place of bricks for the facings; the texture change is quite interesting. Post a picture if you try this.

I'd say LDD still generates significant additional revenue. Lots of folks will buy sets after first building them on LDD; sets which they might otherwise never have purchased. Plus all the folks who build models designed on LDD by ordering bricks from third parties are creating additional demand which ultimately gets translated into more sales; all the bricks ultimately come from Lego. If Lego continue to keep the parts list up to date, so that the sets currently on the shelves can be modelled, I'm sure they'll sell more of those sets.

Given that most folks who get this set will buy at least two, it'd be most useful if they included sufficient extra parts to allow the construction of a second jacobs bogie for connecting the sets together.

They were very profitable for anyone with the foresight to buy a few. And even more profitable still for anyone with the greater foresight to buy a lot. Sadly this was my 'dark period' and I can't ever imagine I'll own one now. A shame, as I travelled on the Super Chief from Chicago to L.A. in the summer of '66 - one of the highlights of my life.

I only needed 35 1x1 white plates also. Plus, I only used 7 1x1 dark bley round plates - the parts list in the instructions call for 8, and there were 9 in my set, leaving 2 spares. I've reread the manuals & can't find a place for the 8th round plate.

Wow, that was fast! A quick initial test shows that you have indeed fixed the bug for computers running XP SP3. It works both with a clean install of MSA2003 runtime and with an install over a previous full version of Access. So a live update to your system broke your previously-working code for all computers running prior versions of Windows when you recompiled it? D**n Microsoft!. There's also a world of difference in the speed with which M*******t issue fixes for reported bugs!! Many, many thanks. John

Once again, many thanks for all your hard work and effort. Let me know if I can help by testing anything. John

Apologies for any delay in replying. 1) WinXP SP3 2) Office Pro 2002 (so Access 2002 is installed (but NOT running) concurrently) 3) On a second machine running XP SP3 but without any version of MSOffice, a clean install of Access 2003 runtime & LDD Manager 099 produces exactly the same set of error messages (this is what I wanted to try before replying, to avoid you having to chase red herrings, hence the delay). Using Access 2003 runtime, LDD Manager 098 runs perfectly on both systems, so I don't think having Access 2002 installed concurrently with Access 2003 runtime is relevant to the problem. Neither version of LDD Manager will run under Access 2002 (which I can't upgrade because that will break something else). Might I suggest looking at any code/scripts which you have changed in v099 as I suspect that's what's breaking the application. Many thanks for looking into this. Best regards John

Gosh, that was quick! - many thanks for such a speedy response. I'm getting this message with all .lxf files, even ones saved directly from the LDD preinstalled models without modification. If I click on "reimport", I can also generate a runtime class 430 error (Class does not support automation). I've attached a simple .lxf file saved from LDD 4.2.5. Not sure if this link helps (I'm no Access guru either) but it just might have relevance: http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=212936 TestFile.lxf

Yes, many, many thanks for all your effort and for producing this useful tool. Unfortunately I can't import any models into 0.99 either and I'm getting the same "13 - Type Mismatch" error message. I'm using the Access 2003 runtime from your skydrive under Win XP. Version 0.98 works fine.