Topic: News

Tim Courtney will be appearing as a guest on the Screen Savers, Monday December 6th. He will show some of the cool things that have been done with virtual LEGO tools, including custom building instructions, rendered scenes, and a new animation from Anton Raves and James Reynolds. Tim will also discuss the L PRIZE contest, an upcoming non-profit software developer contest aimed at inspiring the next generation of LEGO CAD software.

The show airs live at 7pm Eastern (US) time (4 pm Pacific time). It will be re-broadcast the following day at noon Eastern time.

The LEGO Company just launched LEGOFactory.com an interactive site based on LEGO's free Digital Designer software, which will allow kids to enter a competition and possibly have their model produced as an official LEGO set! LEGO Digital Designer is the company's freeware CAD tool designed for kids. LDraw users are now talking about writing converters between LDD and LDraw files, an idea the LDD team has been open to for some time. If you are a developer, join discussion at lugnet.cad and contribute to the creation of a converter!

Also, see Jake McKee's original announcement on LUGNET.

LEGOWORLD 2004 in Zwolle, Netherlands, is just around the corner. Chris Dee from LDraw.org will coordinate the LDraw demonstrations at this 35,000+ person annual event.

De Bouwsteen, the Dutch LEGO club, is hosting two chat sessions for more information on the event. The chats will be held at 21:00 (GMT +1:00 Amsterdam) on 9/25 and 9/26. For login instructions, see www.debouwsteen.com approximately 30 minutes before the session start.

Peeron, LDraw.org's gracious hosts, have begun a fundraising drive to purchase a new server.

"We're looking to upgrade Peeron's server to ensure the service continues to be fast and useful. With over 80,000 visitors a month to Peeron.com, and another 40,000 to LDraw.org (which Peeron donates free space on the server for), the speed and stability of our services has slowed." --Dan and Jennifer Boger, Peeron.com

To read more about the donation drive, see the LUGNET Announcement and the Peeron Donation Drive page.

Upgrade Peeron Donation Drive
We're collecting donations to help fund a much needed upgrade to Peeron's server. Read more.

The second LSC vote has terminated. The 2004-2005 LDraw.org Standards Committee is:

Jacob Sparre Andersen
Steve Bliss
Tore Eriksson
Lars Hassing
Orion Pobursky

There were a total of 16 respondents.

LDraw.org will host two back-to-back Birds of a Feather sessions at SIGGRAPH 2004 this year. Last year was LDraw.org's first year participating in SIGGRAPH. LDraw activities included an activity area at a LEGO fan booth and an introductory BOF session.

This year, while there will be no LDraw booth, we are expanding to two BOF sessions; one to introduce people to virtual LEGO software, and the other to share ideas about developing these virtual LEGO tools. The Developer Roundtable ties into the L PRIZE, a new software developer contest being launched by Tim Courtney.

The sessions are as follows (expand article for more info):

The ballot for the LDraw.org Standards Committee is now open and ready for your use if you're an eligible voter.

A quick reference to the candidates for the 2004 LDraw.org Standards Committee election. The information is drawn from posts on LUGNET, and corrections are welcome, please email Larry Pieniazek.

LDraw.org celebrates five years of being online today. The project began in early 1999 and launched to the public on July 7 of that year, almost two years after James Jessiman passed away. Since then, both the site and the community have grown leaps and bounds. Thanks to everyone who has contributed over the years!

Take a stroll down memory lane, see the original announcement here.

Here's to another five years!

It has been a full year since the creation of the LDraw.org Standards Committee (LSC). Nominations are now open, elections will be held July 15.

The LDraw.org Standards Committee (LSC) is responsible for maintaining semi-regular internal discussions on pending file format issues, the overall progress of the LDraw file format and new or proposed developments made by different LDraw-based software authors. They adopt new official standards by voting on them, and publish documentation on LDraw.org following such a decision. The LSC has documented and will document past, current and future LDraw File Formats.

Read on for more details.