Adding simple mechanic tags as a recommendation to standard

[Roland Melkert]

you want to preserve order of elements within a group. Why?

Two main reasons really the first element in a group is used as it's center point, and second I wanted it to be possible to do 'fun' things with the items in a group combined with loops in scripts (e.g. hiding parts in a certain order over time).

I am confused by an idea that one element belongs to more than one group

For example group1 in model A uses some recursive items from model B, but model B has also a local group which uses some of those same items. This is possible because you could use model B without loading model A to do some very different animation needing different group configurations. The format even allows for different group configurations in the same model which is needed by a new feature in the upcoming 1.5 version.

and what is GID

GID is the global id (pseudo GUID), needed because user given group names might not be unique across the whole model tree, as so could also load just a sub branch of the bigger recursive model.

I have a feeling that writing animation in lua scripts by defining position matrices.....

Current animation stuff is very low level as I'm hoping to add more and more layers to the system, so future versions might also have gui only animations but internally it will (if needed) generate those lua scripts for you, while leaving the option for more advanced users to do everything them selves to maintain full control.