Datsville community LDraw project

[Dilvish]

Some of you might be aware of Datsville, a ~20 year old community project aimed at creating a multi-user town in LDraw. There's a historical page dedicated to it at LUGNET, and a GitHub project with recent activity.

There are also a Facebook page and a Flickr photo stream. Some recent discussion has appeared on the LDraw.org forums and LUGNET.

What we need, however, is more submissions! If you'd like to create and submit a new model please drop us a line. Note that all submissions need to be licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license or public domain.

 

There are high resolution 8192x4096px versions of the above images on Flickr if you click on the download link and select "Original Version".

Edited February 16, 2020 by Dilvish

[Superkalle]

Hi there

Before you do a request like this it is concidered good practice to contact a moderator, just to make sure everything is OK. So, let's talk about it first - you are welcome to PM me. I'm closing this topic for now.

[Superkalle]

...and opening.

With this I'd also like to invite everyone to support this project over at LUGNET. And I'd also like to extend a public appology for my missunderstanding about this and closing the topic. The truth of the matter was that I had no idea who Dilvish was, but this has all been cleared up now

[Dilvish]

Thanks, Kalle!

Forgot to mention two things:

1. LDD models are welcome, as I believe they can be converted to LDraw format, but not vise versa.

2. Any submissions must be made under the Creative Commons license. Basically, it allows anyone to redistribute or modify the work as long as *that* person is equally generous in allowing *their* modifications to be shared and modified, and so on ad infinitum. See:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Edited September 18, 2011 by Dilvish

[Superkalle]

1. LDD models are welcome, as I believe they can be converted to LDraw format, but not vise versa.

Ah, this could be a slight problem. As long as your are only using common and "normal" bricks it should work fine, but anything out of the ordinary and you tend to loose a lot of bricks in the conversion. At least that's my experience.

[Dilvish]

That's too bad. I was hoping there was better compatibility.

[Dilvish]

Here are some of the buildings I personally created for the town:

Edited October 3, 2011 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Some recent additions in Revision 5 plus the latest screenshots in LDView:

Edited December 1, 2011 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

I started an RPG Maker project based on Datsville. Right now all you can do is walk around the town and look at the buildings. There are no dialogue, quests or other interaction as of yet unfortunately.

Here's a screenshot:

You can download the project from the Google Code branch:

http://code.google.com/p/datsville/

Edited January 8, 2012 by Dilvish

[Nealybealy]

Cool project, sounds interesting. I may build a building or two for this project if you want.

[Flipz]

This DOES sound interesting...what kind of asthetics are you looking for? Is there a particular "theme" to this town, or is it like the Lego city every kid builds at some point in their life (all the different themes mixed together)?

Also, if anyone from this project is looking for help designing missions and characters for the RPG side of things, I'm your guy. (Though to be fair, I'm sure plenty of people in the RPG forum here on EB would also be interested in helpin on that side of things...)

[Dilvish]

Any and all help expanding the town would be appreciated. We're mainly looking for a contemporary theme (though there is a small renaissance fair occurring across the river, and Tore Eriksson has plans to create a sci-fi themed multimedia "story" set in Datsville). Some structures I am considering right now include a factory, coal power plant or a rail yard. And, some things that are urgently needed are bigger and better trees. However there is plenty of space for just about anything!

Unfortunately, the RPG stuff I was playing around with probably won't be developed further. My software trial period for RPG Maker is about to expire and I have no plans on purchasing a copy at this point. It's just something I wanted to try to see if it could work.

Lastly, I am experimenting with SNOT roads. Here's what it all looks like right now:

Mike

Edited October 25, 2013 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Update:

I'm experimenting with heightfield terrain generated in World Machine. You can see the latest screenshots here:

https://code.google....iki/Screenshots

It's not as nice as some of the terrain I generated a few years ago. But unfortunately I lost the files somehow, and they're not in my backups.

[edit]

Here's a short video by Roland Melkert showing what Datsville looks like in his LDraw editor, LDCad.

 

Edited February 12, 2020 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Update to revision 308.

I Added several new buildings kindly donated by Tim Gould. I also made several changes "under the hood" to make it easier to edit the town as model sizes get bigger and bigger.

As always, you can find the project online here:

https://code.google.com/p/datsville/

Edited December 11, 2013 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

One of the last few TLG models in Datsville is this adaptation of set 7835.

http://s421.photobuc...7af530.png.html

I was wondering if anyone could come up with some suggestions on how to rebuild it so that it isn't an adaptation of TLG's work.

There are some additional problems with the model. For instance, the gate just barely is able to cross the extra wide street, and isn't able to come to a rest on the shelf to the opposite side.

Here is the model file:

https://www.mediafir...84a51c8oce1twfs

Thanks!!

Mike

Edited December 29, 2013 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Here are some recent hi-res renders.

ldv_datsville_townview_01 by mikh2161, on Flickr

datsville5 by mikh2161, on Flickr

You can zoom in in Flickr by clicking on the little ellipses in the bottom-right portion of the screen and selecting "View all sizes".

Edited January 13, 2014 by Dilvish

[legolijntje]

It's looking great

For some reason, it reminds me of the game LEGO Loco. I don't know why though, it doesn't really look like that...

[Palathadric]

This is a really awesome project, Dilvish! to all of you working on it.

[Dilvish]

Thanks guys! I did at one time import some of the models into SimCity 3000. I even wrote a tutorial, but the images got lost when the LDraw site admin moved everything over to Wikimedia.

http://wiki.ldraw.org/index.php?title=LDraw_to_SimCity_3000_Unlimited_Tutorial

:(

[Dilvish]

I started an RPG Maker project based on Datsville. Right now all you can do is walk around the town and look at the buildings. There are no dialogue, quests or other interaction as of yet unfortunately.

Here's a screenshot:

You can download the project from the Google Code branch:

http://code.google.com/p/datsville/

If anyone's interested, RPG maker VX Ace can be gotten for $1 at Humble Bundle:

https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

I may continue working on this.

Edited June 1, 2014 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Here's a video showing the RPG's current state:

[edit]

How do I embed YouTube in my post?

Edited September 6, 2015 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

Work is still ongoing. I updated the first post with the most recent renderings.

[Dilvish]

Update to revision 501. Here's the latest model map.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/108839565@N04/29465256784/in/album-72157639067501044/

I tweaked the commercial district and added some more parking spaces. I also planted the fields on the bottom right with corn. The remaining changes mostly had to do with cleaning up the LDraw files and adding metadata wherever it was missing.

Once again, we'd be happy to take submissions!

[edit]

Some stats:

               PARTS             P         Total
 DAT files:     1222           462          2730
 POV Equivs:       -           213 (46%)
 Model has 221268 parts (129220 studs)

I was unable to render the whole town model without simplifying some of the geometry using LDBoxer. Without this program my 8GB of RAM was insufficient. Even with this program parsing and rendering used nearly all my RAM and took over 31 hours, 95% of which was spent on parsing and only 5% on rendering on my Quad-Core 3.6GHz AMD A8-5600K. Processing using MPDCenter took an additional 24 hours. Processing using LDBoxer took an additional 48 hours.

I get less than 1FPS in LDView, but it's not too choppy. Loading the model takes a few minutes.

Edited January 7, 2018 by Dilvish

[Dilvish]

I recently created a high resolution render of the town. You can see it here:

https://mjhorvath.github.io/Datsville/docs/interactive-town-map/interactive-town-map.html

Right now we could really use a new church MOC to replace the TLG Eastwicke Chapel model that had to be removed. PM me if you are interested.

Edited February 24, 2020 by Dilvish

[roland]

That page is fun, some thoughts:

" This page may take several minutes to fully load. Please be patient. " it took only seconds for me but the message remains.

You could solve the whole speed problem by making a low res picture of the whole city as a starting point. And then add zoomed layers like google maps etc has.

It's basically the same like what you have now, just add multiple sets of sector images at different resolutions which you select trough scroll wheel movements and scroll by mouse movements.

just my 2cts