Hi matt,

> A cheeky question - is a 64bit version ever likely?

Probably at some point yes, but it's likely to be quite a few years away. It will be a pretty major effort to do it since it will involve an across the board update to a lot of things including using a new compiler, and updates to all libraries.

It will be similar in some sense to producing a new operating system version, and right now I've basically spent the past 6 months already doing that similar kind of thing to produce the Mac version already, so I'm not really enthusiastic about turning right around and doing another generally similar type of work right away...

That kind of work is actually somewhat dangerous for me to dig into because it involves a huge amount of work and then at the end of all that work what pops out the end is actually for a lot of people no different than what I had before, because the 64-bit version will produce absolutely zero benefits for people who are not dealing with huge data.

So I have to weigh that (the "absolutely zero benefits to a lot of people") against the amount of work required, and that's what makes it not a good "bang for the buck" type of work for me to focus on as a priority right now.

The sort of core concept and focus for MoI is much more that it's a tool for drawing and creating new things, and importing a 375mb STEP file is not really so much aligned with those goals in the first place really. It's sort of more of a side effect that MoI is good at that kind of CAD file conversion to polygons since it has a high quality mesh creation mechanism, and I certainly don't object to people using MoI just for file conversion (many do use it just for that because of its mesh quality) but it's not really the core mission.

Then on top of all of that, I think it's likely that some particular feature areas like implementing an instancing mechanism to better deal with highly repeated objects could probably enable a much better handling of large data files in many cases than 64-bit-ness actually...

- Michael