Philippe Hurbain Wrote:So I guess that primitive usage in donor files is of little or no benefit, since they can't be freely deformed and need to be inlined by your program...?Yes a donor will be flattened and used as a collection of triangles and lines only. Those same triangle and lines will be 'dumped' into the resulting model as a fallback so all other LDraw software knows how to render the hose or whatever.
If filesize becomes an issue, you could always reconfigure the part to use static references instead of the deform method, it will then just dump type 1 lines much like LSynth does.