LDD 3.0 Review

That's right, kiddies, after almost a month had elapsed since the should-have-been release date, Lego Digital Deisgner 3.0 is finally here! I've cast my critical eye over some of its new features...

PRICE

I must admit I was shocked to see that my 'brick packs' - LDD files with assortments of bricks that I wanted to buy - had dramatically increased in price. Luckily, after further investigation, it seems there's just an extra £5.00 fine for buying off LDD. If you buy your bricks from Pick-a-Brick online, you can get them for the same old price, sometimes even less. I was comparing the price of a collection of 1x1 plates that was previously £2.95, and it seems to have reduced in price now to £2.17 or around there. Well, unless you want to get sucked into the marketing of LDD 3.0, go ahead and pay the extra £5.

INTERFACE

The LDD interface has changed quite a bit since last time. On the left we have a 'docked' brick palette, with access to the new groups and templates features. On the right we have the extremely annoying 'guide to LDD' pane, reminiscent of the Office pane in MS Word that comes up asking if you need help and whether you would like to open a new document. Sure, this is useful, but the text in the help pane on LDD is extremely short - only one paragraph for each section. They obviously don't expect much reading expertise from their users.

Around your central building section there now lives a selection of transparent directional buttons, including zoom controls and the ever-helpful 'centralise' button. The new layout of those is not the best, but you can easily get rid of them by going into the View menu. The grid has now changed into a lattice of small circles, to show the studs. Unfortunately the half-stud markers are gone, so measuring out 'offsetted' portions of MOC will be harder. The new grid is also much darker and bolder, which is distracting.

One thing I noticed when I first had a go at building on LDD 3 is a clever little trick: you can now, with help from the software, place bricks in between studs, like in the middle of a 2x2 brick of plate. Of course, that raises certain false connection problems (see picture), but ultimately it stops you messing around, trying to beat the software like I did with LDD 2.

HINGE ALIGN

This is a snazzy new feature that pretty much fails at anything you ask it to do. Whilst the usual hinge tool has been improved, and has a static control in the top-left to help you align bricks at 90˚- or 45˚-angles, its new friend, the hinge align tool, was no doubt made for friendly purposes, but ends up being extremely annoying.

If you do the slightest thing wrong, try the slightest false connection, it starts going a little crazy. Put it this way: if you enjoy watching bricks twitching against each other trying to align almost ad infinitum, go ahead and use the tool. It even fails at aligning tracks, too.

GROUPS AND TEMPLATES

Now these I do like. You can quickly select bricks and group them into easily manageable...er... groups, then delete them or even create sub-groups. Though I haven't had a chance to try it out on a larger MOC yet, I'm sure it will be useful.

You can also use the 'hide' tool to invisible-ise a section of your creation and concentrate on an intricate detail inside other bricks. It too proves to be really helpful with large MOCs, and I just love the little hiding minifig graphics.

The templates feature, which can be found next to the groups feature in the same dock as the brick palette, is pretty much groups, but inter-creation. That is, templates are little models that can be dragged-'n'-dropped into any creation you have open. Very useful and better than the crap template models LDD used to have.

INSTRUCTIONS

To finish this review off, the good ol' instructions feature has had a reboot. It's much clearer, larger and had a lovely blue background, but the different types of instructions buttons (building, car, etc) have disappeared. Damn.

LDD 3.0 is certainly better than its predecessors. It's got some great new ease-of-use features, and is much more fun to use, and less frustrating (providing you stay away from the hinge align tool). It's completely free of charge (unless you buy something and get that ghastly £5 "you've used LDD now you pay for your good thinking" fee), so I strongly suggest you go and download it, or open up your dusty LDD 2 application file and let the automatic update do its work. LDD is certainly coming much closer to being as clever and flexible as LDraw or other fan apps. Now all it needs is an unlimited brick palette.

~John