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Lego Island Rebuilder

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Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#51

Post by toyg »

Ueland wrote: post #41
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as we…

> The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego managemen It seems that 'free bricks' in general horrifies them. I went to visit one of the biggest sellers of Lego in Norway and they had been told that Lego no longer wants stores to sell plain lego bricks, but only Lego sets. Which for me seems rather strange.

It's not strange. Sets have high margins and their logistics can be optimized to hell and back. Loose pieces are low-margin and awkward to deal with. It's the same reason you cannot buy Coca-Cola, or milk, on tap from a supermarket.

Capitalism gonna capital.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#52

Post by dolmen »

Impossible wrote: post #25
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…

There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.

Nowadays there are even few LEGO physical products that actually embrace free building.

Most LEGO products are directed building toward one (or a few) models. Even the yellow boxes in the Classic theme (many different bricks).

Free building is just frightening to most customers.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#53

Post by dolmen »

animal531 wrote: post #49
ajmurmann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they tried to build something like it but it turned out hard to keep people from building things that were inappropriate for kids: https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-m...

I consider that a server problem. Why make it an MMO instead of copying for example Minecraft. Let anyone host a server and then people can join what/where they want.

LEGO wants so much to control its brand image that it doesn't want to risk to allow content inappropriate for kids.

So self hosting LEGO-branded games open to the world will never happen.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#54

Post by thrower123 »

rendaw wrote: post #28
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…

Could it be like Warhammer where they're unable to make a decent digital game since they're worried about it cannibalizing their physical good sales?

There are like a hundred Warhammer 40k games now. I haven't played tabletop myself, but Sanctus Reach looks like a pretty direct copy of the rules to PC, similar to the Battletech and Blood Bowl games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sa...

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#55

Post by tallies »

mysterydip wrote: post #14
bombcar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look up Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine from the early 2000s. It was most famously used for the game Ace of Spades 0.75 from 2011. It had very basic graphics and I remember even at the time it was advertised as being able to run on anything. I can imagine a game resembling Minecraft being feasible on high end machines in the early 2000s

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#56

Post by dolmen »

josephg wrote: post #20
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…

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…

Try PyBricks which allows to control any Powered Up/Boost/Mindstorms hub.

https://pybricks.com/

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#57

Post by dolmen »

josephg wrote: post #26
spoonjim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.

There was a statement by LEGO's CEO a few years ago making the same point - that they wished they invented minecraft, and talking about how they totally missed the ball on that.

You can listen to that testimony on the Bits n' Bricks podcast published by The LEGO Group. This is in episode "A Fabled History" (April 7th).

https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g...

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#58

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Ueland wrote: post #41
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as we…

> The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego managemen It seems that 'free bricks' in general horrifies them. I went to visit one of the biggest sellers of Lego in Norway and they had been told that Lego no longer wants stores to sell plain lego bricks, but only Lego sets. Which for me seems rather strange.

Given that the Lego patent has expired and there's plenty of "off-brand" sets out there now, the market is free to fill this gap; it just needs a quality producer, because most of the knockoff stuff is just crap in comparison. A big one could be Minecraft, if they were to produce bricks and brick sets. They'd have to stop charging the merchandise premium though.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#59

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
spoonjim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.

Free Bricks are anathema to a company selling bricks.

They massively missed the boat there - Minecraft became a multi-billion dollar industry.

Re: Lego Island Rebuilder

#60

Post by sumtechguy »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
spoonjim wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.

Free Bricks are anathema to a company selling bricks.

There are a few programs out there that let you build sets using the ldraw spec.

A good place to start is https://www.ldraw.org/ https://www.ldraw.org/downloads-2/third-party-software.html

They had plugins for awhile that exported to 3d programs (blender, pov, etc) for awhile if I remember correctly. There are also links to semi reasonable CAD style programs. There is another editor someone recently came out with (the name escapes me at the moment) that looks very promising.

I would combine the ldraw programs with sites like brickset and others to get the exact pieces in the sets I knew I owned. That way I could build things in 3d then build them for real. I think one of the programs I used had a instruction builder too that you could print out.

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