Hi, sorry about the delayed response. One important thing about the current SDK is that it cannot work with the in-memory model that's live in SketchUp, it can only open existing skp files. So you'll have get the file saved first.
Here are some answers to your questions. For the ones I skipped, it means we should be able to do it.
@th3lurker said:
4b. I used to create new faces using a mesh(because of speed issues), but this poses several problems. The face does not "exist" until i use fill faces from mesh, so i have to store the texture information separately. Fill from mesh erases all entities that existed previously in the group, so i have to wait until i am sure i have no more faces to add to the mesh. Could i use SUFaceCreate instead? Like i said, speed is an issue here, some of out projects have thousands of entities, and 10+ faces/ entity is not uncommon.
Yes, you can use SUFaceCreate but using meshes (i.e. SUGeometryInput*) is currently the only way to map textures due to various reasons. We are looking into adding that to individual faces as well.
@th3lurker said:
Locking the group is not that important
We do not support locking groups yet. I'll make a note.
@th3lurker said:
Are the .skp's backwards compatible?(sketchup8, maybe even 7, i have no real idea what
the clients use).
We currently save only in the 2013 format. It's on our list to be able to save in older formats.
Thanks!