Lego Digital Designer Disappoints Dave

[dvandom]

For months now, the Lego Club has been advertising their new premium club, the Brickmasters. For $40 you get a bunch of stuff, but the core swag is the Lego Digital designer. Since it was PC-only, I resisted joining. Then, finally, they made it work for the Mac, and I joined.

Disappointing. It feels more like a crippleware version with no obvious way to upgrade. You pretty much just get rectangular blocks and a few sample specialty kits that expire soon (Dec 31 in my case). And these kits have a very limited number of pieces, in arbitrary color assortments. There's supposed to be a 'clone' function to stretch these out, but nothing I did could make this work. Maybe the clones still count against your maximum, so it wouldn't make more when I was trying to get an extra piece.

The functions for view and piece manipulation are nice, but this whole artificial limit on pieces is just sad. The whole POINT of a virtual Lego set should be that you can use as many pieces of whatever type and color you want. Maybe there's something I'm supposed to do in order to load up more pieces, but everything I tried just gave me "one copy of the kit" or "no copies of the kit", never "two copies of the kit". And when I was using a kit, I couldn't get a non-generic kit added without eliminating the kit I was using at the time. Bleh.

Comments

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I'll be astonished if Lego proper ever comes up with a CAD solution that rivals LDraw.org (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Editing%20and%20Forms&numpg=10&id=128)'s toolset and, more importantly, piece selection. I've not kept up on it for a while, but they take it very, very seriously. Of course, the major downside is the usual dearth of Mac-based resources....

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy if they just took the damn hobbles off the LDD. Limiting you to 1 or 2 of most pieces is pretty much just saying "We don't actually want you to USE this program, we want you to get frustrated and go buy real Legos instead."

[lameazoid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I imagine they see the obvious disadvantage to virtual legos.

[lameazoid.livejournal.com]

Uh, that link takes me to a Firefox plug in.

[finback.livejournal.com]

This will make it all better.. or send you insane. Which would be blessed relief. (http://www.mrtangent.com/video/CTHULEGO.mov).

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Ahhh...crumbs. I was just sharing the joy of that particular extension with a friend (it's one of the few on my must-have list, especially for LJ users. Thankfully the site I was referencing here was pretty obvious....

[j-anderson123.livejournal.com]

So when was the last time Lego DIDN'T overcharge for something?

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

found these:

Bricksmith 1.2 - Virtual Lego builder.
LEGO Digital Designer 1.4 - Build virtual Lego structures. (demo)
Mac MPD Utility 1.2.1 - Create and separate LDraw MPD (Multi-Part Data) files.




http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?keywords=lego&os=macosx&button.x=0&button.y=0