alienwar9

To SpiderSpaceman: Not to worry you or anything, but that screen you got...well, I got it too and soon after my graphics card fried. The polygons grew out from a "move" in LDD and eventually froze the program and computer. After that happened maybe 3-4 times, the card died and I never got to see me screen with it again. Just a warning, but I really hope that doesn't happen for you. As for LDD 4.0.... WOOOOOOHHOOOO!!!!! super excited. I'm making a back-up of LDD 3 just in case, but this is awesome!

LDDULSMD, well that's a mouth full. I like it! I have to answer quickly, because the cafe corner buildings were bothering me too once I started seeing all the buildings I was going to build. At first I just wanted to save time and money. Then they stayed there because the buildings were numbered that way. By the time I got to building that section, I just really wanted to get the visual concept done so I could start building the tables, so I threw them in there. Then I got to thinking, just like you, why are they in there if everything else is my own creation? Could that be a problem even? It not only seems weird, but its like a big sore thumb of laziness sticking out, after all the effort I put into everything else. So, I'm thinking to still save money, I might use the same pieces and maybe the same purpose for each building, but rebuild them in my own style. Or swap pieces or something. But I'm definitely not keeping them as their official sets. Short answer: to save me $1,000. Oh, I forgot to mention: every building is built with separating floors like corner cafe buildings. I'm tempted to make the tallest buildings crack open (hinge) instead to make them more sturdy, but that is questionable if it can work. Also, all taller buildings will have hand cranking working elevators. The biggest one has 3. And, I left a bunch of easter eggs that I didn't mention (just features I didn't point out). Finally, I'm trying to figure out if I can put lights throughout cheaply without having to drill holes in anything. Thankfully, all the building are built on-top of a technic base for stability, so cost is the real issue. Thank you again everyone! Oh, and I'd love a game with all Lego structures. The best would be like the legolands built into games!

hey all, This post is basically an extension of my last post adding a more detailed look into the city. I didn't want to post it in the same topic because it would just be too many pictures for people to load every time they would view it. Sorry that I am a day late, I wanted to put more in this post and I ran out of time yesterday. Just in case, here is my "part 2" post, and also here is my "part 1" post for old times sake. History Something of an evolution, the layout has gone through so many iterations I sometimes forget where things came from. I have many drawings that were the in-between steps, and a few LDD layouts that were only testing parts, but overall there were 3 real main layouts. One: This is the first layout that you might recognize if you've seen my other posts. You will see a lot of parts from here carried over to the next layout, but rest assured, I had to COMPLETELY rebuild for the next layout. Two: Here you can see just how much more ambitious I wanted to get. Why? Because at this point, I thought I would have a team working on this. The river is wider, the roads are no longer tiles, but SNOT, buildings are not up yet, the whole layout is narrower and longer, and...there is a large new addition: the island. After I scrapped the team plan, I also noticed my budget a LOT more. The X-ed parts are what would eventually get cut piece by piece as the estimated cost went up. What was on the island? -resort hotel -beach restaurant -museum -2 lakeside condo buildings -nightclub on mini-island -gas station -glass skyscraper -2 shops Three: Here is the final layout (I am sure as hell not changing anymore!) The SNOT roads are in place, the 3 parts are cut out, and the final finishing touches to the floor plans are added. It may look like there are parts missing, but this is only so that I could get LDD to run the model, as I had to add the left, middle, and right floor sections and with such giant parts, LDD got VERY ANGRY. Outlined is the EL-line which I am still working on, and the location of the subway insert. I say insert, because I want to have it built removable, but I have to see if I can keep the buildings above it stable when its out (most likely not). The Buildings Here is a quick guide to the locations of the buildings: (sorry for the numbering. It is my personal numbering system that I set up back when I had the island and extra buildings). Buildings: (buildings with ~ symbol are ones I am unsure about, so if you have ideas, help me out ) 1. old hotel 2. red/white El-line modern offices 3. opera house 4. post office ~7. electronic store (times square billboards) ~9. apartments 10. fitness center 11. offices 12. parking 13a. fancy car store 13b. fancy clothes store 14. library ~15. mall 16. tv/radio building ~17. mixed use (undetermined) 18. modern art tower 19. nightclub / bar 24. city hall 25. bank 26. federal building 27. police station 28. glass office building 29. hospital 30. skyscraper (mixed use) 31. skyscraper (mixed use) 33. market shops (8) ~40. condos 41. bar/store/apartments ~42. apartments 43. theaters 44. grand emporium (4 stories) ~45. condos 46. expensive condos 47. pizza restaurant 48. corner cafe 49. fire station 50. victorian house 51. green grocer 52. bar ~59. shipping / post 60. car repair ~61. factory 62. brewery 63. broken down apartments 64. warehouse 65. electricity hub 66. chemical plant 67. dock buildings (3) And here are the pictures for them. I have more angles in my brickshelf when moderated. phew! Extras Here is a picture of the subway insert (left): And (right) is a picture of the inside. There are two landings on either side, and the cars are guided perfectly to them(it was on accident). There are service areas, and one "happens" to be under the bank. More pictures in brickshelf. Here is the double-deck bridge: And (right) you can see it in open position. I am working on a mechanism to automate it with a power functions motor, so its not in its final form. Here is a gatehouse for some of the bridges. I don't know if it will fit yet. Finally, here is a breakdown of one of the SNOT roads, just so you get an idea for them. (colors are for display only) Stats Building 30: pieces: 13,039 weight: 24,084 grams (52 pounds) Total Layout: pieces: 118,678 weight: 281,668 grams (619 pounds) Estimated Complete Total: pieces: 150,000 weight: 350,000 grams (780 pounds) Cost: All roads: $1,867 Lower Half: $4,327 Upper Half: $9,019 Extras (shipping, height stability, bridges, etc): $4,000-$8,000 Total Cost: $19,000-$23,000 Phase 2?:$3,166 Size: 110 (120 at center) x 237.5 inches. 78 inches tall. buildings: 61 (counts split type buildings as 2+) SNOT roadplates: too many (about 160) You might be asking why? why why why...how? How I can answer: these stats include cars and population for the entire city, and you can see how big the city is. Every building has interiors (not added except for the biggest buildings, so that's where the extra 30,000 pieces will come from...that, and finishing everything). People populate the city sparingly (for my sanity, or what is left of it), and every street "area" has 1 or 2 cars to keep it looking "busy". I'm having anyone who wants to build cars help me, so that takes a bit of load off. If anyone wants to give me free-bee car LDD models I'll take a look and see if they fit with the style. All cars are about 6 studs wide, with 8 studs acceptable for large vehicles. You might ask why I chose the scale I did, and it took me a while to decide. I managed to figure that the size of the corner cafe buildings were about 1/4 of a real building roughly. I then took a real building in Chicago that I modeled my tallest building after and counted the floors (from a semi-distant view I might add, so it wasn't easy ). I had set my tallest building at the exact height of 69 inches (now taller actually) so that it would fit where I build it (it was originally that height because I wanted it to be 19 floors). At 76 floors, the real building divided easily to 4 times the number of floors my building had. So...the 1/4th rule. Buildings would be roughly 1/4th the number of floors that the real buildings they are modeled after, and 1/4th the width and length, with 1/4th the number of windows. I later added a couple floors to many buildings as they just looked too short. Go math! Like I said in my previous posts, if anyone wants pics or specific LXF files (aka, not whole sections or layouts) just ask! I will try and get flickr stuff up and out, but I'm getting pretty busy lately. Now to get to work on FINALIZING! once the first "area" is done I can do a real estimate of price, adjust the entire build if there is a problem, and build it IN REAL LIFE!! If anyone knows of any great/cheap large scale piece shops, please let me in on it

Thank you everyone! To answer some questions, the piece count so far is around 117,000 but I'm guessing off the top of my head (I did calculate it somewhere once but I can't find the papers) that it will end up closer to 150,000 (really rough guess). At the moment I am kind of hesitant to share the LXF files, since this might be an auctionable model. And I highly doubt that most people can open the files without LDD crashing. AND all the sections you see in the pictures in their form DO crash (I cannot save them, I can only get screenshots in LDD). I will most likely never post the whole layout LXF though. But, once I start finalizing buildings and blocks, I will probably put up separate parts and buildings. If anyone wants to see anything specific though I will gladly make an LXF file and post it. Unfortunately I did not get the chance to talk to any town MOCers at BrickWorld (which was one of my main missions when I went there). I ran out of time as I wanted to see everything first, and didn't realize there was soooo much to see. This project has since my last post returned to its original form, where instead of a "team build", I would mainly build and fund all of it. I suppose in a lucky way, the amount of time it will take to build this corresponds pretty well with how long it will take to acquire the funds, aka a little more than one and a half years. With the designing, calculations and piece shipment, and actual building, along with the possible "phase 2", working a job to pay for everything, its a reasonable time. I want to get at least the main build done in time for BrickWorld 2012. But like I said, please let me know of any requests for more pictures or small parts in LXF files. Otherwise, I'll be working on my next post tomorrow. Thank you again for all the compliments! It truly inspires me so much

Hey, back in march I had posted my design plans for a large scale city that was supposed to be a "community build" with donations towards the project going to charity. Since then I've done some work...a lot of work. The donations idea is completely scraped, and currently I'm working to try and get a fundraiser where the model can be auctioned off to companies and most of the proceeds go towards charity. But unlike last time, I'm not going to open my big mouth describing how it will all work because most likely, things will change. For example, I wanted to see if there was any organization as a part of TLC that could work with me on this...not at all. They already have strict standards and rules, which just so happen to rule me out. YAY. I then looked into The Clinton Foundation (which is the charity I most strongly supported) and found out they have their strict rules and don't work with what I'm going for. I looked into charity fundraiser companies, but once again, they mostly support the actual charities and fundraisers they hold rather than people who want to hold fundraisers for charities. online auctions? most items are far below this one's price point and it doesn't seem easy to get company or corporate attention (cause very few people have space and are willing to buy something THIS BIG). So its time to make more phone calls, look into other charities, and maybe see if there is a possibility of getting it donated to a children's museum/hospital/care center/school etc. Why not just donate it? Because I can't afford to donate a $20,000 project, to be blunt and honest. But enough about that. I want to explain exactly where I am in the project itself. The Project Note:This picture is a photoshop of pictures of the 3 parts of the city and done crudely. After months of hard work, I went back to check some pictures from my initial design layouts and found out that I had reached the 1 year anniversary since I started this project. Since I am pretty much finished with the visual concept design, I decided now would be a great time to post where I have gotten in a year. It may seem like I haven't done much, but remember I am also studying hard for a degree and trying to scrap together money for this thing. I decided to move it to the LDD section as so far, it only exists in LDD. After my march post, I decided to completely rework the layout. Everything I had from the initial build was ripped apart (in LDD) and used as ghost parts for the new build. I drew up design layouts to include angled streets, accommodate subways and El-ways, and restructured city blocks to be more realistic and include multiple buildings. I added an entire island to become the "new city" where hotels, beaches, restaurants, and condos were located, and stretched the city in length. Since Universe mode was unlocked, I had a lot more possibilities also. I started building test buildings with actual windows and doors to get a more realistic view of what everything would look like. I built SNOT roads instead of tiled roads, and re-sized everything. I added multi-height roads, built test builds for opening bridges, built the main subway station, added the EL-line, made street-trolleys, created a second river between the island and mainland, re-built the raised highway, and started building more accurate versions of buildings to get piece count down. I found out almost every SNOT road would have to be custom, and not copy/paste. Price By the time I got to 7 or 8 buildings and accurately calculated the average price of a road section, I found out I was way over budget. My initial budget was $15,000. I was at $20,000. I cut out the island. I built some more, used LDD manager and Wanted Bricks to get an even more accurate price estimate, and found out I was yet again over budget. I had given myself an increase to $20,000....I was at $30,000 price tag. So I cut entire roads and rows of buildings. My current and most accurate estimate is at $22,000. This includes a reasonable average price per piece on bricklink, an allowance of $800-1000 for shipping costs, and a small over budget buffer. I'm hoping I can get some deals on bricklink, considering some of the order sizes I'll be making. (more like praying every second). The funny part: this doesn't include "phase 2", the destruction version that I really badly want to do. But, if at the end I can work a little harder and get some money together, I will build phase 2 and then auction off those parts separately. For more info on "phase 2" look at my old city post. Current State Once everything was settled to its reasonable size, I finished the rest of the buildings, built some of the extras mentioned above, and measured. It is 9 feet x 20 feet, with a small middle section that is 10 feet in width. The highest point is around 78 inches, or 6 1/2 feet. The table that everything sits on is 2 feet tall. Through painful effort, I managed to get LDD to put the entire base together to measure. With the current level of detail, the city is broken up into 4 parts (the 3rd and 4th were sometimes stable together), as LDD cannot handle everything together. I am trying to get a hold of a really powerful computer to test if I can get everything together. I will be breaking up the city into probably 8 parts and finalizing everything, though if I include baseplates I might have to break it up even further (unless LDD 4.0 fixes that issue and COMES OUT!) Building the entire city from scratch would have made my head explode, so I decided to borrow ideas, designs, and almost exact builds from other MOCs and pictures. For anyone I might have borrowed from, Thank You! Everything I had to take from pictures, so it wasn't a piece of cake copying a building MOC from a single front facing picture. I also did some design mixing where I took elements from multiple MOCs and merged them into one building. I added some of my own ideas, and came up with what you see. For some of the buildings where I could not find any previous MOC that fit what I was looking for, I decided to go to real life examples (oh the internet). Those were some of the most fun, and hardest to build obviously. For the sake of getting a visual concept design done quickly, I had to make these shortcuts. I needed to see if the aesthetic of the city flowed, and if the colors and styles of the buildings didn't clash. I think for the most part, everything worked out, but I have to study the look of everything some more to make sure. I might move some buildings around, change some colors, change some styles, etc. If anyone can point out some areas that can be made better, or any problems or "ugly" patches, please help me out. Note though that some buildings I took more time with than others, so some buildings are plain. They are not finished at all. As for the buildings that I borrowed a lot from, I will be reworking them to be more original, so to be fair. I don't want to be a copy cat, just inspired. The one building that is the hardest will be the tallest. It is very close in design to a building built at the Lego store in downtown Chicago, and it looks so beautiful that I really don't want to change it. I don't know what I should do. Pictures If you look from the above picture of the whole city, these pictures go left to right. Here is the first section: the industrial area, old town, docks, and marketplace. You will find: street trolley raised highway "San Francisco Style" angled streets a few Lego modular buildings (cafe corner, etc) beginning of bridge and road to island (island not included ) chemical plant (building with black tube) and power station The Middle Section is the main downtown area and park. Many of the buildings here are very rough builds, or gutted so LDD doesn't crash. Stuff in this area includes: diagonal road 3 bridge outlines. 1 double deck bridge "wacker drive" road underneath tall building dipping road beneath highway El-line w/cross through building The Right Section is my favorite, the business downtown district. This Section includes: diagonal road 3 bridge outlines. 1 double deck bridge "wacker drive" road continuation underground parking garage river dock river gate entrance tallest building my favorite, red and black building subway with above ground entrances Finally, here is a shot of the whole base layout of the city, without buildings. And... Here is my brickshelf folder once moderated for some extra pictures of buildings, a wire-framing concept to final build of the EL-line building, a screen-cap of LDD as proof that it ran, and some extra stuff. I will try and get higher resolution pictures up to a flickr account hopefully. If anyone wants better pictures of something just ask. I also will be getting pictures of the subway, double deck bridge, fully built versions of buildings, the island, previous versions of the layout, SNOT roads, and a list of what buildings are posted soon. The size and overall layout are final, and the first of 5 tables for the whole model is built. So you get an idea of real life size, here is a picture of 1 of the tables.

Well, I've sort of found a bug. LDD and my large model worked together to fry my graphics card and I had to get it replaced. That was fun. I've worked my computer to death but apparently LDD is worse than anything else and is the spear that stabbed my card, lol. Please please optimize the next LDD so it uses multi-core processors and doesn't hog memory. I have LDD open right now and its using 1,170,000k of memory. It's painful

I might be a little ahead of you on that (sort of). I haven't taken LDD buildings, but I've used other people's MOCs for "inspiration", and since it has taken so long I got lazy many times along the way and did more recreations of their MOCs using pictures. I warn you ahead of time, keep it simple. If it gets too big or complex it will become such a pain. My city has fried my graphics card, and for those who know, I had a nvidia 8800 ultra. But I think that would be an amazing idea to get a community LDD city put together! Make a topic for everyone to post their parts of the city in. I think you should get some standardization for what size and piece count etc, but its up to you. This sounds so cool!! I'm excited

small cities are ok. it all depends on your computer. But when you get to larger cities it will slow down no matter what. I've had to cut my city into 4 parts to get it to not crash. As a word of advice, baseplates in LDD make things a lot slower, so try to avoid them if you are building a larger city.

well, its september...when when when?! I need this update to try and put my model together. otherwise I'm stuck with trying to find someone with a supercomputer lol

As long as the added graphics come with better programming and it can handle large models, I'm sold! FLEX TOOOOOOL! So cool it would be amazing if that worked with strings

1. No. I buy them cause they are beautiful! 2. Both: Individual/Whole. I like every one as a seperate model, but I also am a collector and they are the top of the list. 3. probably a cathedral if possible. otherwise anything that has a natural background, aka trees, rocks, landscape, as part of the model. (castles work well) 4. Any kind of theme set in large scale. Like if market village were a $300 set, or town square. This includes castles, futuristic space stations, city blocks (or anything that would match corner cafe style buildings. So like a larger building or market square or train station. especially a train station), battle scenes, etc. 5. Firstly, I'd like to ask for more landscape to be included in sets. This means things like small build-able roads or alleys for town or corner cafe style sets, rolling hills or fields for castle, rocky outcroppings for sea sets. The more awesome thing would be a line of "corner cafe styled" space / castle / western / historical sets. This means that every set would build on the next, always adding to the total scene. So for castle, like many have thought up, you'd have the walls, huts, houses, and main castle parts connect together. For space, you could have a space station that grows as you collect, with ships that you can add also. A western version of a corner cafe street would be amazing. Finally, within this line, or even for the corner cafe line, it would be great to have "add-on" packs. Things like streets that actually fit corner cafe, parks, cars (fitting corner cafe more than the city theme), bridges, rivers, telephone booths, etc. Castle could have siege weapons, a grassy patch with an army, defensive towers and wall sections. For space, my favorite of these, the options are a bit more fluid, where different sized ships can be added to fleets, different "modules" of space stations, land based outposts, mini-fighter packs. You could even have "collector" and "grouped" packs where multiple little ships accompany one larger ship. And main releases would consist of parts of the capital ship maybe, where you can build up one ship the way you want and keep adding to it, with on-line options with different instructions on how to use a pack to create a certain part of the ship. The main idea here though is this: keep a theme/line around for longer than a couple of years and allow people to keep adding to the theme over time, and keep the main parts of the theme (whether they be the main castle, the main market, the capital ship parts, the central part of the space station, etc) available throughout the run of the theme so that anyone can jump in and enjoy the theme without feeling as if they are too late. With completely new theme lines all the time it feels like the same sets are being re-hashed over and over too much and that some cooler or more odd-ball things never get created. With a longer on-going theme based around "collecting" somewhat like corner cafe, I think it brings incentive to purchase a lot more sets in the theme, and keeps people coming back, rather than saying "I already have a fire station" or saying "this space theme is really different from that other one, they don't really go together". I think that is why star wars and bionicle had so much success also. I think that could be a great route for castle to go to, as there are so many options for sets that it won't feel repetitive if the theme stays around longer without changing.

This is somewhat related, somewhat not, but would it be possible to implement a system into this to get the cheapest prices on bricklink through this? If not, are there any programs out there that do that? The reason being, my project at current form already has 373 unique pieces and will probably skyrocket once I get into the details and I can't even begin to imagine calculating the cheapest orders of them with shipping and whatnot.

AHHH!!! you had to limit the bricks! lol, otherwise I'd enter my project in. Oh well, I'll see if I can use parts of it, though I might run out of bricks there even. 1500 is too little :) corner cafe buildings wouldn't be able to be entered even! Just kidding really. Great contest! Hope it brings out some great LDD usage!

OH MY GOD!!!! This is fantastic! You do not know how much I love this right now. I'm flipping a brick here! This is a much needed program for the project I'm working on. Now if only there was a way to get a realistic price estimate based on lowest price with shipping. So the first thing I did was test this out on my large model and...25561 parts, 84 kilos or 185 pounds, 373 unique parts! and 1169 separate assemblies. Most used piece: dark bluish gray brick 1x16: 2416 of them But unfortunately it would not upload to a wanted list on bricklink. I got a message that said...overload. lol Still incredibly impressive. And its amazing that it all loaded in less than a minute (much faster than LDD, which takes almost 10). Oh, and I'm pretty sure that this is decently smaller than what it was at its largest point. I've been shrinking this monster ever since I've been doing price estimates (which kills me every time) Once again, thank you! Btw, do you think that it would be possible for someone to get this working real time while building the model someday? Probably a crazy thought, but just dreaming about the future Edit: Looks like at its largest, the project had 51,202 pieces and weighed 136 kilos. only 252 unique pieces though. I did have 18,895 1x2x5 bricks

I found a really odd work-around. What I've done is kept my LDD open over multiple "sleeps" of my computer. I have vista so I put my computer on sleep mode and when I turn it back on, LDD seems to take up a lot less memory. I used a bunch of programs at the same time, turned them off, went to sleep mode, came back, and instead of taking up 800,000 - 1,300,000 k of memory, it only takes up 200,000 k. I am also 2nd from the left compatibility mode. There is still a problem though. When there is too much on screen or if I try to move large objects it will slow down, but I can build much more without the program crashing. There is however another issue: I can't save. Saving in compatibility mode makes it crash and not save. But once again there is a work-around for this. Every larger addition I make, I simply save as a template, which works under a different saving system and doesn't crash LDD. Note that I only save the addition as a template, and not the whole MOC. That way if the program ever does crash (or my computer shuts down instead of sleeps) everything that I have done is still saved. I don't know if this will work for anyone else, but I hope it helps.

This is awesome! I noticed that General Discussion and News was getting a bit hard to sift through. Good job Superkalle for helping this happen! As a heavy LDD user I'm glad to see the program get some recognition (and hopefully some upgrades from this )

honestly, I find that it would be pretty unlikely that an alien race would be hostile. As Hawking mentioned in the Discovery channel series, if they advanced enough, they probably could have discovered nuclear energy and weapons. In this line of thought, if they were such a hostile race, would they not have fought between themselves to the point of extinction before they ever got so advanced in technology and so far into space? If they did manage not to kill themselves, would they not need at least a minute amount of compassion? And if they have a bit of "conscience" or adversity towards ending life, I'd figure they would rather not want to destroy or extremely harm us. And in sort of the "live together, die alone" thought, logical reasoning would think that they could be better off working with us rather than destroying us for the planet or its resources. If they would be hostile, I would at least think it would be more like The Day the Earth Stood Still (either one, lol) and that they want to preserve the planet and don't think we can change enough and we are too corrupt or something. But once again, if they are so advanced as to travel such great distances and intelligent enough to see these things, could they not be intelligent enough to find a way to preserve both our race and our planet? I'm a bit of an optimist, sure, but I think logically that they wouldn't be hostile. The only way would be if they are highly self preserving in thought, and somehow come to reason that killing each other is bad for them, but killing others is beneficial to them. Eh, I just don't see that happening. Maybe something else I didn't think of? Oh btw, if you haven't figured out, I definitely believe there are aliens out there. Like Hawking says, probability is they exist. The only thing I feel is that with space being so huge, the chances of us ever running into another intelligent life form is very slim. Maybe life, but not intelligent. It just takes too long to travel such distances and there are too many places to look. That is where I think proof ends and personal belief can really start. I believe we will run into many intelligent life forms, just because of the universe's knack for creating rarity more often than rarity should exist. It makes fun of pessimistic statistics a bit

"And, in those recent years, the project has fallen a year off schedule, the GAO says, with the expected completion date for the research now at the end of 2012" - My favorite part. I laughed so hard from this cause of its morbid ironic nature. Oh end of the world, we do test thee does sound really cool though. I would like to see a bit more of the place however

oh the rock raider pieces. They really barely used those. I LOVE that giant glass piece. Actually, I love all giant glass pieces. I really want the old space hulls and glass back. But what I want most is the old hinges. Honestly I don't care how frail they are, or if it makes stuff more expensive. They just look better, and don't force angles. The huge gaps with new hinges are painful. The piece I want with those hinges is that 2x4 panel. It makes great hatches, doors, window covers, etc. Oh, and I want that giant blue glass door in the old aqua base set. It was beautiful.

Thanks for this! Not sure if I'm going to use it as for the most part I have a hard time picking between the colors I already have. I do have one question though. For some reason my black looks way too much light a dark dark blue, and I was wondering if this is a problem in general or something wrong with my LDD. I am pretty sure it's not my screen or settings as all other blacks on my pc look very black.

Awesome stuff! Great job guys and a super thanks to Lego and their team for letting us have this! Now on a side note, do you guys know if there are any pieces in the un-lock mod from Bojan that are not in the Universe mode? This seems like a silly question, but are the regular modes still available with this? (in the off chance I get "piece overload" ) And do you guys think it would be easy to revert back to the older LDD with the un-lock just in case? I'm pretty sure I won't need it, but just in case the pieces are too buggy or something. Once again, Thanks for this! I couldn't be more happy now

Thanks guys! @superkalle: I'm a bit confused on some of the design reasoning. when you use the longer technic piece, does that help the road in any way? Also, I've tested the "Lego name height" issue with some bricks to see how it would work with the baseplates, and fortunately the slight offset doesn't cause any issues for roads. So the road template that I have works fine. The light gray tiles on the technic pieces on the sides are supposed to be higher than the road, so the fact that the road is actually higher than the technic pieces doesn't cause an issue either. Also, when I continued the road the slope pieces once again wouldn't fit. I'm guessing that the angle needs to be slightly more, as the increase from the "staircase" makes it more than 56 when so many are used. I don't know though, my geometry is rusty. The sloped pieces on the side are supposed to be 1 plate higher than the road btw. @mr. lego_bildur: Sorry for the large size and extra pieces. I completely forgot I was using the modified LDD parts. The size I just thought would make sure that the angle would fit the actual size the road will be. At one point the road becomes a bridge over a river (possibly a lifting bridge). It crosses 2 intersections and goes "through" a buildings block, so it needs to be at that angle, otherwise if even a 10 degree difference, the whole city would have to be reworked (and I've already done that once). The first version is what I need, because the buildings and their respective sidewalks will not be on an angle, and therefore will nee to "slide in" next to the slopes (merging the sidewalks to create roughly a 7 stud wide sidewalk. The building walls will be on their own angle, finishing the sidewalk. I'll try and build something quick a post a picture of what I mean. The hardest part will be the intersections with the roads. I'd like to ask, how did both of you manage to change the angle or do the work around? I probably will be needing to create walls at the same angle and it would be helpful to know how to do this stuff. Thanks once again for the help! Though I'm still up for other options if anyone has ideas!

thanks for the help with this! http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/30249 That is the only part that has the right angle I need for the road. I believe the piece is 55 degrees, but I haven't checked. http://www.gallaghersart.com/mikeslego/Roads/index.html I based it off of Mike Gallagher's road designs, specifically the SNOT road on baseplate with 1 tile increased height sidewalks. I then plan on placing the slope pieces next to the road, holding it in place, while setting them up on plates to level them with the rest of the sidewalks. I guess it might be hard to understand from my poor description though. But I'm hoping it will work. And I'm not sure if I want to have the baseplates on an angle underneath the road like in the models, or keep the baseplates continuing from surrounding buildings, and try and find connection points for the holding edges to those baseplates. I hope that makes sense. I'm going to scrap some sets for these pieces to build a test model just to make sure this works. The previous idea test worked out until I realized the colors made the road look more on an angle, and I couldn't get the center line properly.

I need help rotating this road piece. I can't get the road to fit just right between the sets of 1x6x5 roof tile pieces on the sides. The entire road needs to be rotated about half a degree or a degree. The point of rotation is the white dot in the picture, and I need to rotate from there counter-clockwise so that it will fit properly in-between those. I can't get LDD to rotate it properly, and I am no good in MLCAD so I was wondering if anyone could help me out here. Here are the LDD file and an Ldraw file. Ldraw LDD Thanks for any help! This was such a pain.

WOW. Just wow. That is amazing! And it is so huge. lmao and I thought my subway was nice. This thing makes my subway look puny. Great job!