AndyC

If you think that's bad, try calculating the angle of what Bricklink (again from LDraw) calls a 33° slope!

Connection by a single stud into a technic hole is legal, connection using multiple holes isn't because it makes the pieces too difficult to separate.

Ugh, was caused by the lockdown after the Dropbox security vulnerability, which given I've only ever used it to share LDD models publicly I think I can live with! Should all be fixed again now.

Looks like a 24T Clutch Gear, http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemPic.asp?P=60c01, albeit in an unusual colour.

You can with one of the Power Functions extension wires, which include an adapter at one end for the old style electrical connectors.

It's not just about polygons. When you move a piece, LDD has to recalculate all the possible "snapping" points that the piece could attach to, so it can figure out where to display it. When moving a piece like a baseplate, that has a high number of connection points, under a large model the number of possible connection combinations becomes very large and that is both CPU and memory intensive.

I think this is one of the better changes. Firstly it forces people to actually put some effort into their initial pitch, no more slapping up some quick LDD screenshots in some sort of attempt to claim you did something first. Instead you need a strong coherent idea that's mostly fully formed at the outset, which like the one year limit, should lead to higher quality submissions. Secondly it makes it much clearer what people actually voted on. Under the old system you could have put up a Jurassic Park licensed dinosaur model, reached 9000 odd votes then changed the whole thing into a giant purple Barney model. As a voting system, that was always a fairly major flaw in Cuusoo.

The black pegs will be in a permanent state of compression which will damage them over time. Theoretically it could also damage the brick, although I suspect the pegs would give way before any real wear on the brick. So it's not a strictly legal design, but I can't think of a better solution and, let's face it, technic pegs aren't exactly in short supply, so I probably wouldn't worry about it.

But those kind of projects are exactly why the limit needs to exist. It's a nice enough little MOC, but it's just never, ever, going to be a product that would actually sell in any kind of quantity. Given enough time, it'll trickle up to 10,000 votes, but it's never going to be viable in a real sense.

Honestly, if you can't get 10,000 votes in 1 year it's probably down to one of two things: 1) Your project just doesn't have the appeal you think it does. If finding 10,000 people to do nothing more than "vote" for free is too hard, chances are that finding 10,000 people to actually pay money for the set is going to be even more difficult and TLG really don't want sets languishing in their inventory for over a year. 2) You aren't connecting with the right audiences. And if you, as the person behind the idea, don't know how to go out and find the right audience and get them enthusiastic about your idea, why do you think TLG would?

Well Cuusoo was the name of the external company they were partnering with, so I guess bringing everything in-house probably required a name change anyway, although I have to say that Lego Ideas sounds like a better name to me, it's easier to say and conveys the concept better too. The year thing is also an interesting addition. It was clearly necessary from the point of view of preventing projects from creeping all the way to 10,000 without any of the real momentum necessary for it to be successful, as well as giving a clear cut off point for stale projects that even the creators have probably become bored of. Obviously there are going to be a lot of complaints about it though, because more than anything else they've done so far, it forces you to go out and actually promote your own idea to the people you think will vote for it and many project creators don't seem interested in doing this, assuming that Lego should be the ones promoting ideas.

Wasn't that the whole justification for introducing the new greys in the first place? That in order to make the wider range of clouds more useful, they had opted to us more neutral greys and browns than in the past?

I remember a part like that in my childhood Lego (which was pretty much all hand-me-down stuff) so I'm sure it must have been it a set somewhere along the way.

It's a tough call, but fundamentally the difference (at least to me) is that fictional depictions like Star Wars or Indy generally have a very moral core to their narrative. There is a very clear distinction between "good" and "bad" and through playing out the stories themselves you reinforce that morality in children. Real warfare is entirely different. No matter what any government might like us to believe at the time, there is rarely a truly clear distinction between which side is morally in the right. And trying to simplify it to the level that children understand tends towards creating racial connotations that we should not encourage in children, i.e. Germans/Arabs/whomever are "the bad guys"

To be clear, I don't think playing with "war" toys makes people violent. However I also don't believe there is any benefit from encouraging children to think of war as normal or in any way a good thing. TLG have only a limited number of resources in any one year and I believe they're better spent focusing on positive roles models and play situations instead. It's not as if there is a shortage of alternatives.

We live in a world which already glorifies violence and warfare far more than it should. Isn't it about time we stopped doing that and celebrated the peaceful resolution of the worlds problems instead?

Anything along the lines of "Make X from the LEGO Movie" is probably a fail, it doesn't make sense for TLG to pay someone else for making something from their own designs. Something more unusual, say a Unikitty statuette or something, that TLG might not consider in the usual course of events, might do better however.

First one is this piece: http://brickset.com/parts/design-90202

An easier fix for UAC issues is just to install in a non-protected folder. Anywhere outside of Program Files should do.

I think it's notable that Lego obviously didn't jump on the license at the first chance they got, so they can't be overwhelmingly keen on the idea of official Dr Who Lego. It may even be as benign as monitoring all the licenses that were rejected and this simply being the only one that has yet become available. Given that a lot of the others were actual Hasbro IP (Transformers, My little pony etc) it wouldn't be all that surprising. Still it'll be interesting to see what gets submitted. Whether intentional or not it's something of a call for submissions of Dr Who ideas and it'd be interesting to see what might come along. It's curious that Character (or the BBC) have apparently decided not to continue the existing lines though, or at least I assume that's the case as Lego would presumably not announce it so widely if there was a high chance of the license disappearing again soon.

To answer your original question, no there is no way to add parts to LDD if they aren't included. There is a request thread, which is occasionally passed on to the developers but no guarantees that any given part will get included.

But you can't have it both ways. If men can be thin on the hips or women can have stubble, then the gender of all minifigs is indeterminate. Maybe they're all women already. The things is, the printing was introduced to try and make minifigs more "female" precisely because young girls main objection to playing with them (in general) was that they were too masculine. Now arguably that didn't really work and would eventually lead to the minidoll instead, but the printing has now become part of the minifig aesthetic and I'm not sure removing it really solves anything, if anything it's just increase complaints about a lack of female minifigs.

Actually, it's surprising just how big the Sea Cow actually is. It's proportions are obviously all out of whack (intentionally), but the final model is only just a little shorter than the Imperial Flagship (by about half the IF's bowsprit) and stands a little taller overall. The steampunk aesthetic may not be to everyone's taste, but it really is a beautiful model if you ask me. I tried taking a photo to demonstrate but my photography skills are lacking and you couldn't actually see that the flagship was behind it (yes it's that big!)

I'd expect the "movie" version would include functionality for things like exporting the models as standard 3D formats etc for use by the animators. It's hood to know that TLG are still finding uses for LDD, as it hopefully means we'll keep getting updates whilst they still do.

Changing to an alternate plastic might well reduce costs and improve colour consistency, as well as being generally better from an environmental standpoint. It isn't necessarily an either/or situation.