You can´t do with vertex animations what you can do with bones. Almost every game uses nowadays bones animation because the games are more and more interactive. That are improvements.

[red/]You can import and export bones models with ms3d and fragmotion, so there is no reason why anyone shouldn´t use bones animation. [red]

"It's not fair..." You are talking about workarounds which reduce the quality drastically/don´t work, while there is a tool which produces soft shadows as well as you can draw shadows on the texture. With the dds format the texture is tiny. Anyway, thanks for trying, but these arguments didn´t satisfied me very much