Issues

Further development of Datsville has stalled somewhat mainly due to the size of the model and the issues this causes with editing and rendering software.

1. Datsville is made of many, many polygons.
   1. POV-Ray requires at least 16 GiB of RAM to process and render the model currently.
   2. LDView requires several minutes to fully load Datsville into memory even on a modern computer.
   3. In LDView I get framerates in the single digits when viewing Datsville. Sometimes less than 1 FPS.
   4. I've tried converting Datsville to OBJ format and loading it into Blender. The program simply crashes.
2. Datsville's physical dimensions are large.
   1. LDView's the camera controls become less responsive when the camera distances are huge.
   2. LDCad draws coincident surfaces at large distances.
   3. LeoCAD's camera draw distance is too small for Datsville. Large parts of the model get clipped and become invisible.
   4. MLCad's camera controls are wonky inside the isometric view. This becomes an issue for very large models.
3. Additionally.
   1. MLCad does not support nested MPD files. It will throw an error and complain each time it encounters one, leading to potentially dozens of dialog windows that you have to click through.
   2. Program #1 may have features A, B and C; Program #2 may have feature D; Program #3 may have features E and F. It is very frustrating to have to juggle all these different programs. For a large project this means a lot of extra busy work.
   3. MPDCenter asks to set the name/description of every sub-model. Datsville has over a 1000 sub-models. That's a lot of mouse-clicks!

Fortunately, Datsville is built in sections and layers, so you can edit different portions of the model separately and individually. But editing and viewing the model as a whole is still very difficult.