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As you may have heard, Lorin Nelson has got hold of cassettes of LEGO Island's music - meaning much better quality music than before. A lot of people have expressed interest in lossless downloads, so we put them up online! Link to music More will be add to the page when more is transferred and we get permission from some of the other artists. Some of my personal favorites like Brick by Brick and the park theme have already been included. We're also planning on making a tuned-up collection of the complete OST. We're doing some tweaks to the music since transferring analog tapes is never perfect, and brings some noise and off frequencies with it. Enjoy the tracks! (PS. Lots of lots of love and thanks to Lorin for this, he's done so much work transferring all these tapes!)

I've decided to turn development towards making a little "remaster" of Lego Racers 1. Racing around cartoony tracks shooting cannon balls at other brick built karts, pretty fun stuff. A bunch of work lately has been UI related and thinking of how the menus should look and feel. More work has also went into the kart/vehicle physics and feeling, there's still work to be done, but they're getting better. https://streamable.com/fmnp4 More work went into AI as well. They actually have a very small brain now! They're just smart enough to drive in reverse if stuck, and to follow a given course. Currently they are insanely good drivers, too good, they're very difficult to pass, let alone beat in a race. Gotta make em a bit dumber. https://streamable.com/q5r10 https://streamable.com/37ti3 Lots of other stuff has gotten work done, such as basic HUD elements, sounds, particles, a simple test-track "ripped from LR1" and more. I also quickly added a screenshot camera last night courtesy of Garry Newman, which allows you to take some super cool screenshots ingame. If ya wanna keep up to date further on this project, I've made a Discord server where I'll be posting development info and taking suggestions, feedback, etc. https://discord.gg/TT5FD5q

Here is the first video Lorin produced! Captain Click..! Further info: As seen from the intro, this was produces at Flying Rhino and features Captain Click as baddie stealing bricks from under kid's beds. Wes has talked about this video, and it was a proposal for a TV series - but LEGO wasn't interested.

Again I would like to thank Oboeshoes and UTF for making this great and useful mod. Link below: http://www.rockraidersunited.com/topic/4886-additional-brick-colors-mod/ Anyway I wanted to show my custom racer since they put green bricks into the inventory. As the title says, this is Betty Octane and her 50's indy style car I made this vehicle ever since I install the mod last year and it took me over two weeks to get the right angles. Three inspirations that came to mind: 1. Octan logo 2. An old 1992 LEGO commercial where the narrator talks about Mean Eddie Octane. 3. Google search for 1950's indy car You can view more images in the members gallery. This is all I can show in a meantime but I still have plenty of other custom racers I have made so stay tuned UPDATE: I edit out the menu screen to focus on the car and the racer and to lessen the size of the picture

You might want to look into Entity Component Systems (ECS) as a way to structure everything. After taking a dive in the wiki, it appears that the LRR engine was structured similar to an ECS originally, though clearly it was made "to just work" rather than something that was made to be reused and extended. And re-usability and extendability is presumably what a remake is for, after all. There are plenty of resources online that can explain what an ECS is and what its advantages are better than I can, but basically it would allow for content creation and addition to the game to be trivial. Possibly even as simple as creating a single script to add new monsters, vehicles, buildings, etc. (excluding additional assets like textures and models), like you said yourself, and anything extending the actual engine could be done with a few java files through the help of an API. There are a lot of other advantages as well such as easier to maintain code, less resource hogging by objects, possible performance improvements, etc. It also reduces spaghetti code. Of which any coder is undoubtedly guilty of at least once. Either way this is just food for thought (that delicious spaghetti code), and I am by no means an expert on ECS design. Also lua is a great idea for a scripting language. I took a look at LuaJ and the performance seems comparable to java as long as it is compiled into bytecode instead of interpreted. But then again lua probably runs faster on modern hardware than LRR did originally, so... this is a moot point. LRR isn't exactly a resource intensive game.

Yes. This is my MOC from my personal avatar. Where did I get inspired from? THIS! Well at least he did his best so I try much harder for him and this is the result: If your curious of what's inside: Phew! that's it for today. I might make some changes soon if i'm still not satisfied but until then, I'm out.

I noticed a while back that the Alpha Team character models underwent a suspicious change during development. Let's look at our buddy Flex here. This is a screenshot from the released game. Like all other minifigures in the game, his legs protrude directly from his body. There's no hinge holding them to the inward sides of the legs like on real minifigures. Let's look at some beta screenshots. Ah. Tonight I noticed something more - if the game is loaded without any textures (aside from lightmaps in this case, though it can do without them, too)... ... Well, would you look at that. Curious if part of the body texture was simply turning it transparent (it didn't seem so, as there were no transparent pixels whatsoever on, say, Dash's body texture), I loaded the game with only Dash's body and head textures. Nope. The geometry in question has actually been given a different texture called NoPrick.tga. It's a 4x4 fully transparent texture that renders the pricks nixed. Sadly this texture is shared between all minifigure models, the original UVs have not been retained, and it's also used for some mysterious invisible trapezoidal geometry on a few baddie models. Furthermore, all the prick's materials have a slight greenish tint for reasons unknown. So, loading Dash's body texture in the place of NoPrick.tga results in this: It appears as though if one wanted to restore the pricks, one would have to wrestle with the models fairly extensively, in addition to the question of why they're attempting to do such a thing in the first place. That's all for now! Tune in next time for "Wait, why does mf_main_loc.nif in LEGO Universe have nodes named loc_lt_nipple, loc_rt_nipple, loc_bellybutton, loc_naughty, and loc_butt...?"

I didn't realize how much I would miss LDD updates until they stopped.