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The problem is that you cannot just go and develop plugins for various pieces of software ... not without HAVING that piece of software to begin with.
Yes. Also, there are SO MANY different packages that trying to supporting all of them would be foolish. We try to support the major ones with 3rd party tools, but they get outdated quickly.
That is why I'm interested in FBX. FBX is an "exchange" format, think of it as a translator. We wouldn't support FBX in the engine, instead we write a single tool that converts FBX files into MDL7 files. Then we could use any package that writes to FBX.
This would be insanely great if three things hold:
1) Is FBX really free (as in speech)? It looks good but I always worry about "free" tools from for profit companies (look closely at the "free" physics SDK for PhsyX). So what's the catch with FBX?
2) Will this become the standard? So far it looks good, but writing a conversion tool is only worth while is other people are writing to the format.
3) Does it support everything we need? Can you export your animation, shaders, etc.?
From what I've read, FBX may answer all these questions. But I'd like to hear what other people think.
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