WhiteHexagon

I've managed not to buy any of the newer trains stuff. Maybe it's just me being old fashioned, but nothing quite seemed as good as the 12V stuff with the nice points and lights controllers. I'm just hoping I can get it all working after so long. Well UPS is out for delivery, so I will find out this weekend :)

Now you are showing my age :)

After a recent visit back to visit family in the UK, I have uncovered a box of my old LEGO. I had a quick sort through, and found it has been used/abused quite a bit in the last 20 years... So firstly I noticed the center metallic rails in the old train sets have corroded, is there any tips for cleaning these up? One of the engines was actually dismantled although all the bits seem to be there, but with a worn gear on one of the axles, so not too hopeful for that one :( Also pretty much all my minifig spacemen have lost their faces, is it possible to still get classic face replacements? I know LEGO recently had a classic space minifig for VIP members, but is it really the same? maybe I can get parts if so... I left some yellowed white bricks behind, they seemed to almost have gone softer with age. It seems I had a few blue train rails!? but I dont recall where they came from, did they pre-date the electrified rail stuff? Anyway I hope the box of LEGO will arrive soon and I can have a proper rediscover and reminisce. The big question being then, do I keep it all separate from my AFOL collection!!

During my research I just found that Heroica is already available online from the big L themselves! At least I understand the rules better now for the sets I bought. I hadn't realised you were 'supposed' to play the 3 chapters after each other and had been wondering what the point of the gold was :) Anyway this week I'm working on the color / colour pallete and it seems there has been an explosion of official colors since before my dark age!! so I'm going to just use a core set for now. The actual game design is in flux at the moment and seems to ossilate between a 6 month and another 6 year project! It's hard to leave my old design and ambitions behind.

71006 The Simpsons House - but almost tempted to keep it MIB looking at current prices!

10224: Town Hall 79003: An Unexpected gathering 3857: Heroica Draida Bay 50011: The Battle Of Helm's Deep 3874: Ilrion A couple of key chains and a PAB order My dark age is well and truly over! :) I also signed up for the VIP membership. They sent me an email about access to exclusives, so I tried the early access to the Simpsons House, but it wont let me order :( I'm sure that set is gonna sell like hot cakes!

This was my original concept for the Quest part of my game: After many years development it sadly all fell to bits, mainly due to the technology choices I made on the client side (Java and OpenGL) . I did consider porting it to Java on Android, but iOS is a lot easier to target ie. I can just target iPad. I think a touch interface could even work better than my previously complex mouse interface. But I'm also not sure if it is worth it, I guess I've just had this idea for so many years now and I want to have a last try at making it work! :) Mainly because I never have enough real bricks to build the type of MOCs that I'm interested in. ie. Massive dungeon complexes. Well I'm interested in any ideas or feedback and maybe I can post information here if enough people show interest in the project. Oh and I just managed to grab 2 of Heroica sets I was missing :) It would have been nice to have the full set though! what a shame they discontinuued the series. Things like that take time to catch on, and they could have evolved the theme with a more DnD esque series of sets.

I'm just emerging from a LEGO dark age after a 4 year break, mainly due to 2 relocations and not having enough space for my LEGO until now! Anyway after grabbing a couple of new sets, I have decided I want to get back to doing some software. Mostly I've been inspired by Heroica, since it reminds me of the Quest part of my Java game I was previously developing. I'm interested in what people think of the official Heroica game system, is it too basic? or does it have lasting appeal? Really I just want to be able to build simple MOCs on my iPad, but the thought of adding a simple game system like Heroica also has a lot of appeal :) I see from the forums here that part of the community have already extended the basic rule set into something quite interesting. I'm wondering if something like that would even translate into an online turn based game, or would it take the fun out of it? I'm just interested in opinions at the moment! The fact that Heroica has been discontinuued is a bit discouraging...

Well the work never ends, but there is still some progress being made. We've switched to first person view now, and things are starting to feel really fun! We can't accept any more beta testers for now, but hopefully in the new year we will update the servers with the latest version.

Well I guess I'm the only one to be disappointed with the image removal. One of the nice things about sites like this, is the chance to get sneak previews on upcoming sets. It seems anyway that the pictures are available elsewhere, and there is even a youtube video of the MGR set.

I've been mac based for a couple years now and never looked back. I can understand the difficulty in switching at 1st but within a few weeks I'd found replacements for all my old windows stuff. For image work I use pixelmator. I found the gimp interface too non mac, and photoshop too expensive. If you keep an eye open, they sometimes do bundles of mac applications and I picked up pixelmator and a 10 others apps very cheap that way. Also you might want to grab parallels for running windows at the same time, great for some of the lego design programs that are windows only.

yes and yes, without EB I would never have realised it was OK for adults to collect LEGO !

After my dark ages and a couple of years collecting again, I still hadn't realised LEGO fans were even online! Then I was working on my game and wanted to share my new found love for all things LEGO again. After a bit of googling this seemed like the most interesting place around, and still is! :)

Since many of my players are EB members, I wanted to ask for a little help... As many of you know I'm working away to make the best ever online building bricks game! I'm busy working to add some customisation to allow players to change the DigiFigs face. So I'm looking for a couple of volunteers to draw some extra faces for me! The winning designs will be added into the next release of the game in 1 weeks time!! and if you're a registered player there will be a 20,000 Plastic Pieces reward! I've included a template below, and you just need to make sure that background stays transparent (because the head color can be changed), and the face design is within the magenta box. Note that the top and botom of the image will wrap around the curved head slightly, so use the examples as a guide line. One face will also be used for the ingame Zombies so you can use your imagination a bit more there. small print: Please do not submit copies of other peoples work. The image needs to be designed by yourself. By submitting an entry you are allowing me to publish and use the image in any way I want, without charge. No alternative prize can be offered for the 20,000pp ie this is zero cash value prize. etc etc You can email entries to: faces at whitehexagon dot com, or add them to this topic for all to see and enjoy. Good luck! Peter download template .png file Here you can see how the above faces look when applied in the game:

Thanks. It's written in Java using Eclipse, with an OpenGL library called JOGL. Modelling is done with Blender. We tried to keep the graphics real simple so that it will run on quite basic computers. Java means it should run on many operating systems as well, although it's only been tested on Mac and Windows. We tried to keep the game quite generic and interesting to anyone that likes building with bricks. So mostly it's building, but the short clip shows a turn based Quest which is more RPG I guess but very basic at this stage or development. The camera is controlled by the players with cursor keys and mouse drag, which is maybe why it doesn't look so smooth, plus my skill with YouTube are pretty poor :)