Hi Jon, instancing is probably going to be a V4 thing. V3 has already been in development for quite a long time and I'm pretty much trying to wrap it up. There are still some things that I want to add in for V3 but instancing is not a good fit for a "tail end of the beta" type feature because it will involve a lot of UI, and changes to low level things like the display engine.

MoI was originally conceived as a CAD modeler that would put a priority on ease of use and being friendly for artists to use rather than only targeting mechanical engineers. It's still got that focus, and although it has a very good mesh export and I'm glad that the mesh export is useful for people, it's not really a primary design goal for MoI to sit at the later stages of a pipeline like you want to use it, it's more intended to be used for drawing concepts and creating early stage things from scratch. Hopefully that may help explain why the things you are specifically focused on have not been implemented yet.

Eventually I do think that MoI will get the whole set of features that you're looking for, but it will take some time. V3 will still not hit these particular areas that you have has your own priorities, sorry.

Usually you can still get the export job done with MoI despite a lack of instancing by being more strategic about exporting just some portion of your overall set of objects at any one time rather than just going for a one ginormous export of everything all at once. There are also some settings you can adjust in MoI to make a rougher display mesh which can also conserve quite a lot of memory as well. See here for some tips:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5322.2

If you apply the advice there it would probably reduce the out-of-memory problems you're currently seeing.


- Michael