alienwar9

Ahhh, ok. Well, I can give you the red "casing" of building. That's probably the only part of the building that is complicated. The rest is a pretty standard floor-by-floor building build. I placed a couple of black squares inside to give a reference of where the building sits. LXF

I loved that game! One of the first games I ever played, along with the super awesome off-shoot descent: freespace. That MOC is an excellent take on the ship. I know for a fact however that the techniques used are not possible in LDD, so if you'd want an accurate recreation it would have to be done in LDraw or SR3D builder. To be honest, I am not good in either of those, but I'd also love to see this be turned into a whole set of Lego creations I put my vote in! If I have the time, I might give a try to recreating that ship in SR3D builder, or LDraw if I can ever figure that program out

If only that were so. I've had to swap out graphics cards (my last one fried from LDD coincidentally) and the gap in performance of cards was large, but LDD's performance didn't change at all. One of the main stress points most people see is when moving a large amount of bricks, LDD slows to a crawl. While the rendering aspect of transforming the visual geometric model might be done on a GPU (I'm not really all that knowledgeable on 3D programming, so correct me if I'm wrong ), the calculations needed to figure out connection points for the pieces is most likely done on the CPU. In cases where I've torn apart a section only to later put it back together, the program will figure out all the hundreds of connection points that were originally there incredibly well and if I've moved the chunk to just the right position it fits together, but it takes a lot of processing power to do it. When I select the entire model to move it, then there is usually never too much of a slow-down. What might be the real issue is memory, both RAM and cpu. Once again my technical knowledge is small, but my guess is that the giant calculations send data to the cpu to process, and it gets bottled up in the bus before the cpu can even handle everything, so even if you cranked up the processing speed of the cpu, too much data is sent at once. LDD uses huge amounts of memory when models get big, but I noticed that long before my memory gets capped out (LDD maxes out maybe at 75% of total RAM; including other processes) LDD will slow/crash/hurt. So I don't think RAM is the main issue, but its definitely indicative of what could be the problem, extremely large calculation sets. Also, I've had instances where I've made a move that has crashed LDD after longer successions of moves, that after a restart LDD had no problem with. LDD tends to build up its memory usage with further actions (another example, I've used the undo button and LDD has crashed). What could be a benefit of multi-core functionality is that the code written could allow the large calculations to be sent in a more efficient manner to the multiple cores, as opposed to a large linear calculation dump to a single core. But again, I have no idea if that is true or if I'm completely misunderstanding how this stuff works. Hope my experience can help get a better understanding of whats going on

I've been wishing they would re-write their code for multi-cpu support, since I really really really need it. But I'm guessing, and as far as I've heard, that its not that easy and they would have to redo a lot of LDD program to make it work on multiple cores. While multi-cpu computers have been around for a while, the main customers for LDD rarely use it for such large projects, and its core purpose is the design by me aspect. Though they have done a lot for us fans so we'll see. I've got a quad core, and LDD runs at max 25% (if you open up task manager it shows you individual program cpu usage). To think...I could put my city together for once

Oh my That is one amazing LDD creation. Normally I have to like anything that is massive in LDD , but this is beautiful as well. I love the turbines! and the fact that you can open the nose is great. This would be amazing to build in real life!

@DLuders: Wow! I'm not sure if I've seen those. The Trump Tower is definitely a new one to me. Funny, I think I just finished a building with that same piece use (except with black plate background). @Matanuilover: I'm not sure what you mean by the "X" part but I'm guessing you mean the diagonal road. I can give you just that road, right....here It includes a modified version of the bridge mechanic for the one side, and a really messy method to control the lock on the other side. Note only one side of the bridge lifts. I might make the lifting part longer, just so that there is more "clearance" for boats. Note: Most of this is not color corrected, so I haven't checked if the pieces exist. I'm still going to have 1 final pass over the whole city to check colors....fun

I don't know about that. I've seen some amazing space creations out there without the need for printed figs, and the quality of previous RCBs tells me this community can come up with some amazing builds without the need for tons of figs. That's why an apoc themed build doesn't scare me (even with the usual apoc moc full of custom figs). oh poop...now I want to vote for apoc theme

I'd love to see a collective build incorporate an environment. It may seem hard to say, cooperatively build a lake, mountain, or forest, but as I've seen in these builds people are remarkably good at working together towards completing something. So, say for the space outpost, it would be on rocky terrain, or on an alien plant forest (think avatar or Felucia, star wars mushroom planet) For a castle environment, a castle on a mountain face, next to a sea line. A city could include streets, parks, rivers, etc A western town could include mines, railroad tracks, etc. Since these environments might make the whole thing piece intensive, the moderator could take each part and put them together, and send only the surrounding part for the next builder. A few other ideas for builds: Western town! Please? space outpost: asteroid mining outpost (built on asteroid), floating night club Castle...an actual castle Apoc themed hideout ninja-go fortress / medieval Japanese village Renaissance era street Ancient city: Roman, Atlantis, Aztec, Egyptian.

Here are the two buildings in the section: building 18 (modern style tower) and building 19 (bar/club/apartments) This building is almost 2, as it has an inner black tower, surrounded by the dark red shell (yes, that's a lot of dark red pieces ) I basically took 3 buildings and mashed them into one. This was an extremely fun building to come up with and tinker. The casing splits into a top level and bottom, and the bottom half is attached to the second floor of the building almost exclusively. Here is a close up of the entrance and the street details. Also a top down view to see the star pattern. Building 19 was an easy build, using multiple techniques I found and playing with them. This is also the first building to have a green roof. I decided to have this as a representation of Chicago's green efforts. I'm still thinking about how far I want to go with this.

Here is the second of 11 sections of my city project. I decided to finish the entire section before posting this time, so the only preview was of the brown bridge until now This section is probably the most complex, as it has the "star" building, my first bridge build, my first attempt at a finished diagonal road, and to make the angled road worse...a diagonal bridge! As I mentioned in another post, I won't be including the final versions of whole sections. I'm including a lot of pictures, but I'm willing to upload specific parts if requested. And of course a bird's eye view. I did this section with the other side of the river also, as it was just easier that way. I also added the lights on the other side of the main street. So here are pictures of the whole setup I worked on. A few "close" ups And once again, a bird's eye view of the whole setup. You can get a good idea of the road layout Piece count: 17,635 (without other side of river) (took me like 10 edits to get this right for some reason )

Dear lord! That shortcut, and to think I've been working with LDD so many hours (days...weeks? I can't even count by now) and not found it/used it. You shall have saved me SpiderSpaceman!

Thanks! I was thinking that piece too (I had a couple from some old sets I barely remember) but I checked the price on bricklink and they aren't cheap. And since I need 6 sets of counter-weights for 6 bridges, the price for just counter-weights might go into the hundreds I probably should build it in real life first, huh

Update: I've rebuilt the central mechanism, so that the "motor" is beneath the large gears, and there is room for a counter-weight. My only problem now is figuring out what the counter-weight will be. LXF The yellow is where the counter-weight will go, and the green is what the weight has to counter...the entire bridge. I also highlighted the central column that everything sits on in purple. ALL the weight goes there, so if anyone has an idea on how to re-enforce it or if it needs any at all, let me know (ignore the direction of the giant red arrow, its the other way ) I am deciding between just putting a bag of sand or mini weights there, or actually building something from lego. I need help though in figuring out roughly what would be good to do to counter the bridge weight. Any ideas?....

Absolutely Amazing! I love how you finished it off with the river; it really brings the whole build together. Everyone did an outstanding job making the RCB a thing of beauty. I can only imagine what will come next....

Thanks! No, technic rotating parts don't "work" in LDD. You have to fake it by manually rotating a piece that has the whole group together, in this case rotating the center of one of the really large gray gears. The rest of the bridge moves with the gear because they are connected. I tried it in SR3D builder (since it actually has working animations for gears), but it didn't work and parts were flying everywhere when I tried to rotate. (Still helpful to test the lock mechanism).

LXF (1,700 pieces. Its hard to rotate, and you need to remove some pieces first that are not connected; and possibly the "motor" gears) I got excited so I wanted to share this with you all before it was finished It's 1 of 3 bridges in the city, and the easiest one to make, so I started with it. The 2nd one is in the city section pictures, and is a diagonal street bridge (will be an extreme pain ) and the 3rd one is a double-decker two sided draw bridge (bascule bridge). Here you can see the bridge in place in my city section 2. And open. (It was such a pain to rotate, its now 2 days later that I post this) And a street view Here you can see how it is held together and how it rotates. Its not that sturdy, but it was the only way I could get it to work and not hit other pieces. This is the best view of the mechanism I could get. You can see the structure under the road, the mechanism down the center used to push the lock in place once closed, the arched support, and the gears "motor". You can notice I took the gear system from the UCS lambda shuttle wing design, and added a third gear set. It was supposed to be a temporary solution to make the bridge move slow. Since the gear design is fragile at best, I really want to redesign some of it. I want to place the gear housing "motor" below the main large gears, instead of next to it. Then I have room under the road to make a counter-weight (another problem).

Thanks! Only one little issue, I have no idea if there is a file that ever existed in the first place and have no idea where it would be, or what it would be called. By the way, I'm running vista (really want 7)

UPDATE: Looks like I overestimated my model originally. It was at a total of 118,678. Actually, it was supposed to be 113,718 (I saved 5,000 ) But my current total with all fully finished models is at 159,513 (over my old estimate). Thankfully, I think I can safely manage a total of 200,000 pieces with an average price of $0.13 per piece. So, I have 40,000 pieces to finish 10 sections of the model. I finished section 1, and it added 25,000 pieces (5,000 from the subway). If I go at this rate, 91,000 MORE PIECES!! way over.... I need to trim 51,000 pieces somehow. Any ideas? One idea is to build the tables higher, but it gets complicated with the river, lower roads, etc

I love the new speed! Soooo much faster Thank you so much for releasing this wonder! It looks like once again the piece count is off somehow. My latest build, "building 29" has 10,060 pieces, but LDD manager says it has 10,073 pieces. Before it didn't count some pieces, but now its counting more? Here is the LXF

Here is the last building from Section 1, building 29 (hospital). I decided to include the LXF just because its really hard to see the details in pictures and I'm proud By the way, its 10,060 pieces so with graphics off its not THAT bad And a little garden in the back (I love the way it came out. It originally looked terrible, and I almost left it that way ) Note that the complete section 1 pictures are from LDD 3.0. It actually saved too! A nice "street view" and obligatory roof shot I think that this is the final part of section 1. I can actually start buying pieces based off of this, and I almost have enough $ to do it! TOTAL PIECE COUNT: 39,043 initial low contrast count: 13,000 + 4,500 (subway) it seems the model is growing more than I had anticipated, and I might once again be over budget

A few additions I noticed in 4.1: the colors show up fully when you hover over a piece to color it, even when zoomed far out. It doesn't do that weird partial shading. It is also much more responsive. I will note that with the color painter tool out, rotating slows down a lot more; it must be doing more calculations now because it fully renders the color difference for every piece you hover over when turning. The metallic colors and transparent colors look a lot better with advanced graphics on. Especially transparent. It seems interior modeling of transparent pieces is better/crisper. (look at trans blue and trans red on large pieces...pretty When you hover over a piece with the color picker tool, it "pulses" or glows. WOAH The outer cable pieces flexibility is awesome. They have a tenseness to them! The multiple angle rotation feature for ball joints is pure amazing! I figure this could even be used to place pieces in hard positions, where normal rotations or LDD methods can be a pain. Say placing a piece at a certain angle at a certain distance, for connections that LDD normally doesn't recognize. I have to test this though. As far as I can tell, all the models that opened with 4.0 open with 4.1 (in respect to size limitations). So the largest models still open in 4.1 if the opened in 4.0. I did notice LDD "tried harder" to open the large files before it crashes...but it still crashes

And so my search for removed bricks starts again I love the new color selection format. Much better; I was always so impatient waiting for the drop-down colors to come up, I just used the color picker most of the time @Superkalle: The 2x8 brick wasn't in there before? ....huh EDIT: ahhh, no idea they made a new 2x8 brick, cool! I do have a question, so now that universe mode is public, does that mean that a ton more bricks are now "supported" by Lego, and the few that are only within extended mode (plus colors) are not?

Actually, my computer is 3 years old, but with some added/replaced parts. Windows Vista 32-bit (I really want to change) Intel Core 2 extreme QX6700 2.66Ghz (clocked to 3.2Ghz, quad core) 4Gb DDR2 6400 RAM (800 MHz) Nvidia EVGA GTX 460 1024mb (overclocked, new part. My old one fried because of LDD actually ) 150GB 10,000 rpm hard-drive 2TB total extra hard-drive space Creative Soundblaster X-Fi sound card (old part) and a nice sharp 30-in 1080p tv ...I'm a pc gamer

I guess the main thing I wanted to be able to do is filter the pieces so that only different piece count ones would show up. I guess subtracting the 2 isn't that hard to do in my head afterward Since there are like 700 different pieces, going through and reading every single pair of piece counts between models to find which ones are different is a bit hard when there are so many. So like in my screen shot, it only shows the pieces that have different piece counts in the two models. For example, in the model commonality analysis, you have the 2 columns that show piece counts in each model. Model 1____________Model 2 7 _________________7 342________________342 2 _________________1 49_________________49 19_________________18 84_________________84 Its not much fun trying to pick through that to find the "red" ones, or counts that are different. It would be nice to be able to filter out the "black" ones. That, and have a bottom table that shows the pieces (and count) that are only in one model. That way it is all in one operation, to easily compare the differences. Just a streamlining, cause its a bit odd to have the two methods as separate (I have no idea how hard or possible it would be to combine those ) . For example, I don't know how many people use the "average difference" in piece count, so that could be a column that is left off (unchecked)...That might just be me being lazy and wanting it unchecked at the start . In a sense, I'm suggesting having the two features be a "Difference Analysis" and a "Commonality Analysis". The commonality can stay the same, but the "compare models" feature would not just show pieces that are only in one model, but show piece count differences also. I hope this helped in explaining what I was trying to say, and can be useful too I also sent you a PM with the LXF that had different piece counts in Excel. I found that the regular "import model and view parts" list left out some parts, like "outer cables", but still counted them in the final piece count. So for my model, it had 33,430 pieces, but in Excel there were 33,410. Out of that 20 difference, 11 were outer cables. I still can't figure out what the other 9 are though. I'm excited to test out this snappier functionality!

Well, once again updating. Looks like I'm getting into a good groove with this project. One little tiny problem...it crashed again. LDD 4.0 hit the size limit and I still have 1 more building to go (the white one). I had to transfer the work to LDD 3.0, and I had to do extensive excel/LDD manager work to find the deleted parts. And some parts are not in the old library anyway I just hope this section is the largest and I don't have the problem with other ones. On the bright side, this is really the only section that HAD to be together (because of the subway), so if a section is too big, I can split it...again Enough about my issues. Here is building 26 (federal building), 27 (police station), and 28 (glass office building). Notes: the police station was a pretty direct inspiration from someone's building, so I had to modify it a lot. I kept the color scheme and the general design, but I added my own spin to the detailing, turning it into a older castle/classical style. This is the first of 7 buildings I am going to have to do that to, plus the corner cafe buildings. The glass building is made using 1x2 trans-blue tiles...a lot of them. All buildings are still separable into floors, which actually helped in building the glass building...kinda And the backside of the buildings, with bus station, subway entrance, and a pretty water fountain (I want to add water trails with pieces in real life). And here are the buildings within Section 1. I love roof shots The pictures with the whole section were taken in LDD 3.0. Oh, and I guess I made a mistake in assuming 2x4 tiles came in light gray I'm changing them to 2x2 as I post this.