Is it likely that you add a function to save a mesh from within the engine as an mdl?

I'm giving workshops about game making for kids, and get more and more younger children who are hardly able to get satisfying results within MED.
So I worked on an editor that allows to modify existing models in game by vec_to_vertex. I save them by a code contributed by ventilator, http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.p...true#Post185155, but it saves only in the format .obj.
First the models with the format .obj don't load reliable, means sometimes they load, sometimes they don't.
Second the format doesn't store animations or bones, but I would like to let the children modify animated characters as well.

Thank you for your time.

What a great contribution to the community.
Great job ventilator!
If we would have an mdl exporter i definitly would use that...

What about this?
http://server.conitec.net/down/wmpmdlsdk7.zip

Yes, there is the SDK, but it is still a lot of work to use it as a base for an exporter.
Its probably less work for conitec than for anyone else.
If there is anyone in the community who wanna do it and who _can_ do it, that's great, but I don't know how to do it.

+1

I totally agree.

It is not so easy to use it. I did. If you don't call the functions in a specific order (at least for reading a MDL7) it crashes. But if you do, you can easily transfer the model data into your own datastructues, which might be better engineered than the SDK' ones.

Saving a model in the engine with the SDK includes much more than just calling some functions in the SDK, though. If someone shows, how to e.g. read out which triangles connect which vertices and how one could access the UV coordinates (I, for instance, don't know that), one could write a very basic function that translates that into suitable datastructures for the SDK and then you can save it.

I would really like to use a function to saving modified models in fbx.
My knowledge simply isn't enough to do it.
As i thought, and as it turned out there are hidden or semi-hidden tricks do the whole process like this:
And so on...

If this gets implemented, please for hmp-terrains too. Would save _a lot_ of trouble to have an engine function for this.

from my experience it's pretty easy if you can live with some drawbacks, like maybe changing texture formats. If everything should stay exactly the same, it can get an pretty annoying task as you have to convert e.g. the engine textures back to the right save format.. (and especially read out the mdl file before saving..)

but as already said, generally it's not too hard, and i could implement it in the next weeks (weeks not days!), as i'll work on a resave functionality..

To save the model with _external_ textures, while ignoring the textures and their formats, is absolutely sufficient, IMO.
I guess, when you save the model with external textures, there is only the path to the texture that you save within the model.