Hi FDP, much of what you are asking about is for production mechnical CAD. Meanwhile the focus of MoI is on making an approachable tool that enables users other than mechanical engineers such as artists to gain benefit from basic CAD modeling.

So there's a fundamental mismatch there, the overall focus of MoI on being easy to use and working well for artists is not going to change in v4 or in the foreseeable future. I do expect to add more organizational features in v4 but if you are needing the feature set of a production mechanical CAD tool it is indeed probably in your best interest to look into stuff like Solidworks or Solid Edge and I would not advise you to expect that MoI is going to be a replacement for a more focused industry specific tool like that. It is not generally a goal for MoI to be a total drop in replacement in production for such tools.

Adding in all the kinds of things you're asking about would most likely have a side effect of bringing complexity along with it. If you need that complexity to help you do your work, then MoI is just not the right tool for your complete job. Of course, if you enjoy using MoI and feel comfortable with it, you don't necessarily have to abandon it completely, you can still do your sketching and quick modeling in MoI and bring your geometry over into your "heavyweight" production CAD for further work...

Also the first beta of v4 is still not even out yet and it's fairly difficult for me to guarantee which specific features will be in it, other than it being 64-bit and a Mac native build which will be in there right from the first beta. Other features have not been worked on yet and I do not have a fixed roadmap for exactly what will happen.


> * Is there a path forward with MoI V4 to allow for the ability to take a 2D curve
> sketch and have it feed-forward on operations in a way that allows for the user
> to go back and modify the initial curves and have the results permute through?

It's something I'm hoping to work on, but I am very unsure at this point if it will make it into v4 though or will have to wait until a future version.


> * Will there be a way to nest hierarchies and add in metadata/tags? I would love to put
> part suppliers, prices, web links, links to drawings, etc in as object metadata!

It's pretty likely that I will work on a grouping function for making hierarchical name tags in the scene browser. All these other things that you list though like part suppliers, prices, web links, and links to drawings are quite a ways outside the scope of what MoI is focused on and so are pretty unlikely.


> * Can we link Images to objects to improve reference drawing integration?

Seems pretty unlikely since it's been very rarely requested to my recollection.


> * I think I saw instancing mentioned as a maybe, we need that so badly!

This is pretty likely. Both grouping and instancing at a basic level are high on my radar.


> * Can we have parts libraries that link to external MoI/Rhino files in a zip file or
> external directory tree so that I can have a central repository for parts? I would
> love to be able to load in objects from an external file and link them into another
> file (and fully instance them for export). Right now screws have to get loaded in
> and saved with each MoI file - this can easily inflate the size of my files by 10X
> and kills my loading time.

I'm not sure about external references. Probably at some point but it seems pretty unlikely for v4 where just basic instancing in the same file is still not established as of yet. It's likely that feature areas like this will come out at a basic level in one version release and then once that seems to be working well further refinements and more advanced levels of it wouldn't be likely until some other release after that also depending on general level of demand.


> * Internal revision control? I have used GIT as an external manager to handle
> revisions on large MoI projects, and this gets tedious.

It is something that I've thought about before as part of a large history overhaul but it will involve a lot of work and is highly unlikely for v4, a lot of other history related foundation work needs to happen first before digging into this.


> Right now my projects always devolve into a total mess and are full of
> objects with names along this format:

Unfortunately it's a symptom of trying to force MoI to do things that it's just not designed to do. If you need a full production MCAD featureset then a tool that's very much focused on being lightweight and easy to use for non engineers is just not the right tool for your particular workflow.

I can certainly understand that you like MoI and want it to do everything you need and that would be more comfortable for you, but unfortunately making MoI into a Solidworks clone would likely make it a lot less comfortable for other users while simultaneously requiring a lot of work that is difficult for a one person shop like me to undertake.

Basically you should not expect MoI to turn into Solidworks, not in v4 and probably not ever. In fact if that happened it would probably mean that I'd messed up pretty bad because it's much more of a goal for MoI to work differently than a production MCAD tool so it works for people who aren't going to be able to use those types of things because they're too expensive and complex for them.

Hope that all makes sense!

- Michael