Michael,

Just a note on instancing (when you get to it)

It would be great if you could enter a negative scale factor on any of the axis. This way by using the scale factor: -1,1,1 (x,y,z) you could create a mirror duplicate (mirrored about x) for an instance. And of course then edits on the right half would automatically be mirrored in the left half.

While we're on the subject, it might also be good to be able to 'hide all instances' of a grouped object (I'm assuming you might have to first GROUP an object in order to have it instanced). This way one could focus only on the instance for editing, then toggle between the single instance half and all instances full model.

I would also expect instances to have their own local coordinate system with it's own movable center (pivot) point, so they can be translated, scaled and rotated anywhere and still maintain their link to the parent. And of course one should be able to "Freeze" an instance which would decouple it from it's parent. And of course grouping and instancing with hierarchies would make for great robots!

I suspect an instancing panel would be something like an array panel, with choices between 1D,2D,3D or Rotational array along with the number of total instances, delta offset, delta rotate, delta scale. It might be also nice to do delta "jitter" for randomness as well, though that could probably be added in a plugin.

As you start to think about instancing, I know you'll want to think about memory and display speed. Perhaps there's a way on startup or install to run the video card through some MoI specific tests and time how long they take. That way you can offer to reduce the display curve precision if/when the number of surface patches get's to a certain level. I dunno. Maybe not possible.

I have a funny feeling adding instances to MoI 4, even in 64-bit mode, may create the opportunity for some unstable use cases. Not really sure how to prevent something like that-- though automatic saves might help.