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Lego Island Rebuilder

legoisland.org

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Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#11

Post by beachy »

herbstein wrote: post #10
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core compet…

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here. My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released th…

My son wants your job!

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#12

Post by herbstein »

beachy wrote: post #11
herbstein wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here. My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released th…

My son wants your job!

I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out.

And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#14

Post by mysterydip »

bombcar wrote: post #7
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core compet…

Minecraft itself was developed surprisingly late - there’s nothing really preventing it from happening ten years earlier.

While the graphics are/were crude, the sheer number of polys and the dynamics of the world and layers of drawing wasn't possible in the early 2000s. Not in first person at any rate.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#17

Post by virtue3 »

voidfunc wrote: post #4

Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's. I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story. I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000's someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and th…

online interaction back then was kind of a big no no. Nintendo took a long time to implement it.

Anything targeted towards children was basically not a good candidate for online collaboration because of the fear of predators.

I think we have a good model now of how to do it correctly and what sort of safe guards are expected in the software to protect end users so it's less of an issue now.

Minecraft also did a good job of separating public/private server (or at least it did back in the day).

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#18

Post by missblit »

josephg wrote: post #5
voidfunc wrote: post #4

Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's. I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story. I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000's someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and th…

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core compet…

There was Lego creator, though building part was 3rd person so probably closer to KidCAD than Minecraft.

I actually really wanted to like that game as a kid, but either my computer wasn't beefy enough to run it, or it was a buggy crashy mess (not totally sure which).

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#19

Post by Negitivefrags »

josephg wrote: post #5
voidfunc wrote: post #4

Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's. I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story. I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000's someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and th…

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core compet…

I don’t think someone with lego in mind could have come up with minecraft.

The problem is that there really isn’t an interface for building with Lego freeform that doesn’t suck for new users. Not many people are willing to get good at something like that for purely creative reasons.

Minecraft works because it’s limited to 1x1x1 bricks. The interface you can make with such a restriction is significantly better.

But I don’t think anyone thinking about lego would have seen that as an acceptable trade off before minecraft.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#20

Post by josephg »

herbstein wrote: post #10
josephg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core compet…

> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here. My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released th…

Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.

But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers.

On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.

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