Quote:

I don't really buy the excuse that 3ds Max changes to quickly outdating proper exporters. Infact, 3ds Max remains a bit bloated to keep proper support for alot of old plugins.



This is not the case. At least not in the "early days". Plugins for MAX 2 did not work in MAX 3. Plugins created for MAX 3 did not work in MAX 4. However, Discreet did allow for MAX 4 plugins to work in MAX 5. With MAX 6, though, MAX 4 and 5 plugins no longer worked. MAX 6 plugins seem to work in MAX 7 and 8, though. This policy of Discreet (and now Autodesk) has made many people more than upset with them because many of these plugins cost hundreds of dollars and you usually had to buy them all over again simply because you upgraded to the newer version of MAX.

As an example of this, someone had created the original MAX2MDL plugin for MAX 2.5. It would not work in MAX 3 so we had to have it updated (which meant we needed the MAX 3 SDK to do so). Later, when MAX 4 came out we had to do it again. MAX 5 gave us a rest, but someone else handled bringing the plugin over to MAX 6.

MAX is NOT bloated to be backward compatible with old plugins. This is totally not the case. In fact, if you look at the various changes in the SDK for MAX over the years it would seem that Discreet made subtle changes to it mainly to PREVENT older plugins from working in newer versions of MAX. In fact, getting MAX2MDL to work in later versions of MAX was often a change of one or two lines of code to accomidate some SDK change and that was all (and these changes were nothing specific to the exporter, but to getting the plugin to run at all in MAX).

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My main concern with something like FBX would be having to worry about the different flavors per modeling program and dealing with changes made to each one as the respective programs evolve.



I am not so certain this is a concern. The format will most likely evolve for various reasons, but GameStudio would only need certain things from FBX like geometry, materials and textures, lights, animation, etc. Most likely these things are properly in place already and so they should not change much from here on out though I could well be wrong .

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