Topic: News

The Jessiman family and LDraw.org will be presenting the first James Jessiman Memorial Award at Brickfest 2001 this year. This is intended to be the first annual presentation of the award which is to honor an individual who has contributed to the furthering of LDraw, the DAT format, and James' memory.

LDraw.org is pleased to announce that Don and Robyn Jessiman, the parents of the late LDraw creator James Jessiman, will be attending Brickfest 2001. Tim Courtney, Erik Olson, and Bram Lambrecht are planning a talk on LDraw programs, current development, and a question and answer session to follow. The Jessimans will also be involved in the LDraw talks.

The second anniversary of LDraw.org is now only two months away. It seems only yesterday this site was launched with high expectations. In that two years, what has been accomplished? Of the many original goals the contributors had, how many have been realized?

Several people have in the last year reported problems with getting access to www.ldraw.org. The reason for this problem appears to be that the default "time-to-live" (TTL) for TCP packets is too low. I have now recieved confirmation that this is very likely to be the case - at least for people using Windows 95, 98 or ME. On these systems the default TTL is set to 32 hops instead of 64 (as suggested in a RFC from 1992).

Today LDraw.org released a new subdomain, mlcad.ldraw.org. The new site will be responsible for the maintenance of the MLCad resources on the web. In the near future, MLCad tutorials and tips will be made available at the new site to aid users in getting the most out of the software.

Legoland, CA - The week of July 12-15, representatives of LDraw.org set up a display at the Lego Maniac Kidvention to help spread the word about LDraw and the online Lego community. Among the people there were Tim Courtney, Terry Keller, Bram Lambrecht, Mike Poindexter, and Thomas Michon and family. During that time, the demonstrators built Jin Sato's MIBO robotic dog, for demonstrations of the uses of LDraw-generated instructions.

In the last couple of months Steve Bliss has lead the work on defining an extension of the LDraw file format. The extension, called BFC, will allow LEGO CAD programs based on the LDraw parts library to render LDraw'ings almost twice as fast as now. Great care has been taken to make sure that LDraw, and older LDraw compatible programs, also will be able to render files using the BFC extension correctly, albeit without the speed increase.