Devin is actually not working for Chaos Group anymore. So even if he had insights on what's going on, he probably can't talk about it.

The ruby-side of the whole layers system is just a mess. It's really difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of everything. What the user does, what he expects to happen, what Layers Panel should do, and how. Some stuff is not even possible, for other stuff I had to use really dirty workaround.
You just ran into one of these. Nothing in the ruby API is planned to keep track of when a scene is updated.

I'm aware of this issue, but I never found a better way to do it.

I know Layers Panel has problems, but the reason why I stopped pushing it forward is because the ruby API is not meant for this.

Frankly, if I knew in what I was diving into, I probably would never have started this project.
And that's why working on Skatter is so rewarding : It's a whole new tool, it's not built on some existing Sketchup system, I don't have to keep track of user actions outside the tool, etc. So it's much more stable and easy to develop.

EDIT : You can see the original strugle on this : http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=180%26amp;t=54473

What's your technique?

Oh yeah, don't worry about subscription!
It'll be a one-time purchase granting you a license valid forever. All the 1.x updates will be free.

Then one day if there is a v2, it might be a paid upgrade (or maybe not, we'll see)

@mike basil said:

The only functionality my plugin provides is object distribution, but doing so without collisions and more evenly - as (arguably) can be observed in the nature.

This is actually the very reason I started developping Skatter All the random-placing plugins were too random and produce clusters.
This draft became the "uniform" distribution type in Skatter. It's essentially a grid with a random jitter which is a percentage of the grid spacing.

Anyway, I think it's great that at least one free plugin offers this kind of distribution! People might not want to pay a Skatter license for just that feature.

There will probably be a launch discount, but it's certain that it won't be as big as this one.

Bob, sorry it's taking so long. There's a lot to do, I'm doing my best.
Trust me, nobody is more eager than me to see Skatter released!

Hi everyone!

Just a quick post to announce that every Basecamp attendee will get a massive -75% discount on Skatter! No exception
Along with an exclusive presentation of Skatter's possibilities.

Hope to see you guys there

http://3dbasecamp.sketchucation.com/

Hi everyone!

Just a quick post to announce that every Basecamp attendee will get a massive -75% discount on Skatter! No exception
Along with an exclusive presentation of Skatter's possibilities.

Hope to see you guys there

http://3dbasecamp.sketchucation.com/

You can try to untick "Can be overridden" for each material until you find the one causing the issue.

Do you have displacement in your scene?

@jql said:

@aceshigh said:

Will it work on with Thea for Sketchup? What happens when the scene is exported to Thea Studio?

I also read that it will work with any engine as it is able to skatter components as well besides that impressive render on the fly. If it skatters compoents, they can certainly be exported by Thea4SU into thea studio.

I just tested, and even when using the "render only" feature, the scattered items are exported to studio.
Tomasz did a really great job at supporting Skatter

Whow, where did you dig out that quote?
Great to hear your project is still alive!

Sounds like you lack RAM due to the displacement.
What does your Windows Task Manager looks like when rendering the scene? (Performance tab)

This is indeed Selection Toys from TT.

Some variables holding their old values?

@driven said:

78000 chars long

They store the preview image as a Base64 string, maybe that's why?

Hopefully

@derei said:

Or at least, if you are not willing to, maybe someone else would take it to continue, if you will agree on that. Is so bad that an advanced layers manager goes to die.

The source is on GitHub, anyone can fork the project and push updates. I'd be glad to release them.

GitHub - thomas-hauchecorne/Layers-Panel

Contribute to thomas-hauchecorne/Layers-Panel development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

Moving forward

You guys will be the first to know when it's about to be released
But I think not before at least septembre.