- Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:
> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.
My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.
This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.
by pizzafeelsright
0 subcomment
- I am not a big fan of the predesignated final 'this is the only thing you can create' type of set. When I build with children or on my own, I pick a direction and end goal. Example: the goal is for us to build a "Space Shark Transporter" and set a time limit.
At the end we take photos and then animate them using AI.
- If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just how hard it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.
- I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.
by no-name-here
2 subcomments
- Very interesting article, but not very well written. A handful of examples from the first half:
1. Suddenly in the 7th paragraph: “We know for a fact that from 1967 and until 2003 the main supplier of drawing building steps for the LEGO Group was a company called Palle…”. That’s a super odd thing to preface with “We know for a fact” - are all other claims/items in the article actually not known if they aren't similarly prefaced?
2. They jump around a little in time, such as mentioning the 60s but then going back to the 50s in the next section.
3. Some photos don't show what year or decade the set or instructions are from.
4. They start by mentioning the 50s, but it would be helpful to also mention how long the bricks were made before then to quickly understand the length of the pre-instruction era - it appears 49, or 39 for wood versions, per some quick googling.
- Modern Lego set design is this super refined art where the final product looks amazing. It also sort of sucks, ninety percent of the pieces are 1x1 greebles with very few common structural elements, Distinctly different and I feel inferior from the peak of my young Lego architect career in the late 80's, and even then in retrospect, still way to many greebles and not enough structural elements. Sure you want a few of those infernal 1x1's but it feels like the era that best matches the Lego ethos was the 70's where most of the set was structural.
There are a few sets left like this and I bought some to get my nephews Lego bucket started. but still way too many useless small pieces.
- This reminded me of coming across LeoCAD (https://www.leocad.org/ - first release in 1997!) as a kid and playing around with it for endless nights, wondering how close it was to whatever tool Lego was using in-house.
Looking at screenshots of older versions gave a burst of nostalgia.
- Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter:
https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/
https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/
I'm actively trying to get good instructions out of the legolization project now
- There is other good stuff on that site.
Eg that tractor.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-the-lego-fergu...
by shevy-java
2 subcomments
- I liked the old LEGO up to around the 1990s or so, give
or take. When I look at LEGO nowadays, of course they
have some of the old spirit still in place, but in other
areas they are just overpriced now and addicted to
maximizing cash influx. This was a bit different in the
pre-1990s era. 1990s already got more commercialized
but I still would say it was somewhat ok. Then something
shifted and I am not sure what. The creativity seems to
have been degraded. I saw some huge LEGO sets for several
hundred euros as collectors edition. And I understand that
he had fun building it with his kids, but to me this was
no longer LEGO. The most fun I had was assembling my own
pieces back when I was young. For instance, after seeing
the old movie Tron, I built a few of the objects in the
"matrix", in particular those floating T-like thingies.
These were quite easy to build via LEGO. I did not need
instructions, I just experimented until it worked. I think
this was the biggest selling point of LEGO, to be able to
build things on your own. When I look at those huge expensive
sets, that seems to have shifted. I get it, different portfolio
and what not but this is also corporate fluff. It changed what
LEGO is, and IMO it changed it to the worse.
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