[papamac]

Originally Posted by Snow

Whenever an objects is modified, it's going to the end of the hierarchy.
It's important that there's an option to disable that.

When working on an animated cockpit for X-Plane, the exact hierarchy is extremely important. Whenever AC3D does it's automatic sorting, it's messing up the animations.

The exact hierarchy is also important for the drawing order or for avoiding unnecessary status changes regarding the dynamic lighting or drawing state or hard/soft surfaces or 1-sided vs. 2-sided geometry.

Usually, a 3D cockpit contains a large amount of parts with their own animations. Each of them in a single animation group. In most cases this requires scrolling the hierarchy window. Now let's assume one of that groups in the middle of the hierarchy is edited, that group gets moved to the end of the hierarchy by AC3D.

To move it up to the right position again, the only way is to use the 'Move up' option in the context menu repeatedly, because dragging it up with the mouse and place it between other groups is not possible. It will always be thrown into one of these other groups.

Also there's no automatic scrolling if the top or the bottom of the hierarchy window is reached while dragging an object, so it is necessary to put an object into the wrong place, then scroll the hierarchy window, dragging the object further, put it into the wrong place, scroll the hierarchy window, drag the object further...

All in all not very user-friendly.

Speaking for the Shade Tree Micro Aviation team, we all agree with Snow. Automatic sorting of objects causes us major heartaches in creating X-Plane objects.

- Jim