Hi Igor, well all these kinds of many various options are kind of something that I rather hope to avoid if possible.

If there is some way that would be the most common way that everyone wants to use it, then I'd prefer to just make it work in that way instead of making both more complex code and more complex UI to control so many different various ways of generating the output.

With many different options available, I'm also then left with the problem of having to decide what the defaults should be. And if I get that wrong and make some kind of unexpected configuration the default it leads to quite a few people being confused about why they are not getting the results they expect.


> If we choose map styles to layers as a first step then
> I forgot to mention that all geometry itself should go
> to layer0 and a group(or component) container should
> go to a respective layer - only containers should be
> sorted into layers - not geometry itself

Sounds like another potentially complex "bag of worms" - is this a common practice with SketchUp to not put the actual geometry on layers? If so, then I guess it makes me wonder why SketchUp would be set up to allow it if it should not be done. All these many various kinds of choices (output geometry to the document's entity container? Or a group container? or as a component? etc...) add quite a lot of complexity and potential for confusion. I know it does not seem like that to you since you've got a lot of experience with SketchUp so having a panel full of all these options with all these particular terms in them (and implicit stuff like geometry not going to the layers, ...) is not going to be a problem for you, but try to think about what it will appear like to someone who is far less experienced...


> That depends on the methodology of an assembly in MoI -
> I once heard from you - that styles is a different name
> for layers

Well, sort of - I've tried to make it similar in many ways to how layers work, but it's not quite exactly the same. But it's also similar to how materials work as well since it controls the visual appearance of your objects. And when you export to a rendering program through OBJ format (which doesn't have any concept of layers in it), they become materials at that time.


Anyway, when there is not a clear answer for how something should work and instead it needs some kind of choices and configurations, that just in general often times makes me tread slowly and cautiously because it tends to be difficult for me to remove complexity like that later on, and generally adding more and more complexity all the time is one way that UI in general gets bogged down and turns into something that is difficult to use rather than something that is easy to use.

- Michael