Easter WishlistHi and thanks a LOT for this great piece of software!
I appreciate very much what you are doing for everyone's benefit (and mine). 
After working with it for a while (current V2.3b21), I found the following things would be useful in future releases (V2.3final+):
- Export to .OBJ without a floor: I have seen others request this, and its most obvious benefit would be easier designing of multi-level buildings (One thing I did was designing a slanted roof standing upright, with windows and all; and then rotating it into its proper position on re-import).
Yes, I have read the workaround solutions offered, but they are all a bit difficult or complicated in some way (I used Blender to remove the unwanted floor level from my exported .OBJ files - it took me half a day to figure out how to work that program properly) - the text editor trick for instance did not work with the original object, but parts of it had to be created freshly to clear out accumulated code.
My point being: You are doing a great job helping users out in this forum, but wouldn't it be easier and less time-consuming to fix this in the program once and for all, so people stop bugging you about it?
Pleeeease? Other users have pointed out that SH3D's most important feature is its ease of use, and I couldn't agree more - so it would make sense to me to do without the assistance of other programs - to make it a "one app for all your designing needs" program.- measurements ("create dimensions") are not "objects" on their own right, they have a serving function. As such, it would be great to have them permantently attached to the edge they measure. As a result, when changing the measured wall or object, the "dimension" would auto-adapt and abolish the need of re-doing them manually every time you change and object's position or size.
- You can split walls, but so far, not join them. This might sometimes be useful when trying to fix texture problems.
- Objects often move while selecting them with the mouse pointer if the pointer moves even the slightest bit. I often find my objects moved unintentionally because it is very difficult to keep the mouse perfectly still when selecting an object, wall or room. Most of the time, I just need the context menu, but I cannot use that before I have selected the object in question. Maybe you could make the right-click select the object under the mouse pointer before opening the context menu, so that there is a safe way of selecting objects without moving them? This leads me to...
- Locking of objects in the base plan: It was a good idea to implement the locking of walls and rooms. Could you please extend this feature to furniture? Once I have placed a shower or a toilet, it is likely that I want it to stay just there. You could add a "moveable" check box in individual furniture properties (just like in the "import furniture" dialog).
- Snapping, snapping, snapping ("Magnetism"): I agree with others that expanding this feature would be very useful. My suggestions:
- snap objects into wall corners
- snap objects to other objects
(e.g., for lining up kitchen furniture without overlaps)
- snap the the active end of a wall that is just being drawn to the middle of other walls
- snap the corners of a room being drawn to the door openings, just the same way as the automatic room generating (on double-click) works. When drawing rooms manually, it is very difficult to get the door openings properly textured without having the room overlap with a neighbouring room (which often leads to floor texturing problems for me).
Also, I find it rather difficult to use the snapping of room corners, as it seems to cover a very small range of only 2 or 3 pixels. The sensitivity of the snapping could be made a user-determined parameter (for those with high mouse speeds like me
) in the "Preferences" window, between 1 and 20 pixels or so. As is, I have to hold my breath to hit the mark most of the time. - texture display in the 3D view: I was so enthusiastic about SH3D that I mapped all my surfaces with rather intricate hi-def textures. I soon found out that the program is bound to crash sooner or later if you put wallpaper and tiles everywhere
So I carefully reduced texture resolutions and positions so that I can work safely now, but my poor old single-core CPU [@2500] is still sweating heavily under the load it needs to render in the 3D view, giving me a framerate of ca. one frame every 3-5 seconds. 
I would love to see a checkbox in the global preferences that allows to toggle "render textures in 3D view". I can easily live without the splendour of textures in the preview - I just want them in the hi-quality "photograph" render where they belong. Every textured surface could just display the average colour of its texture (needs to be determined once when loading the texture and is then a resource-saving 3-byte value
)- Oh yes, and of course I, too, would love to see multi-level capability in the future! Most houses just don't have only one floor
In case any of these issues should be system-related, I am using WinXP SP2.
I hope I didn't bug you too much
, so thanks again for SH3D! 