@Orange Brat: Let's be clear about this, I totally agree the latest A6 is very good and A7 is looking great.

However, if you try to do anything with character animation of a Pro quality, (and remember we are only talking about A7 Pro here)these missing animation features are a big deal.

Without the separation of the animation data you will rapidly run out of memory if you try to have the number of animations needed for a typical modern game, as you can't share one set of animation data among multiple models. Ask Larry about animation space difficulties on the Mothers's Den demo for example.

That's why this method is already used by all the AAA engines and all the best indie engines too.

GPU skinning simply gives you a performance gain in most cases and frees up CPU cycles for other uses like better AI etc. which is why most modern engines give you the option to do it this way.

Please don't take my comments as knocking A7, these are simply positive suggestions for the future of the Pro version that are already the industry standard way of doing things, not some sort of crazy request .

@joey: here's a link to good explanation of GPU skinning if you want to understand what I'm talking about http://lynxengine.net/ati.htm