Right, I'm going to let of some steam.
[Rant at the 3D industry]
So ok, close to 8-9 months ago, I started researching a good 3D finterchange format I could use for this game.
So, I have been busy reading, reading, debugging, writing test code, until 11-2007. After months of research I finally ended up with COLLADA but even that had limitations and is still giving me headaches today. And then I read the bad news that FeelingSoftware is dropping it's development on the free plugin library (which does alot, but is still incomplete). I'm at the point where I consider dropping this format as well because it just can't do what I need. I have to move on looking for alternatives (yea right!), or even just forget about multi-UV import/export. The alternative not-so-nice approach is to export models x times, where x would be the number of channels. You'd basically end up with 2 exported files for a model with 2 UV-channels. Same for import. There are other problems involved here that I desperately seek to avoid...
I've read hundreds of topics on 3D formats by now, and it boils down to a format war in the industry. Everyone is keeping their own proprietary format, and they refuse to adopt a standard which does all. The standards that are there, are hard to implement, or incomplete or not widely supported... And they are a 'standard' from a select party, not the entire industry.
The formats that do what I need for this game are so difficult, miss features or closed/undocumented it is becoming very frustrating. I have manually debugged close to a dozen or so formats by now (compare that to 2 formats: DAT/SDL). I could have finished this 6 months ago if there was a good public format available. Oh yea, or if I could buy an SDK ($$$) for one of those proprietary formats... Or ask Right Hemisphere/Feeling Software, or some other company to do it for me ($$$)...
I don't understand for the love of god, why today - 2008 - there still is not one good 3D interchange format available that everyone supports. If you know of one (mesh,material,multi-uv,bones/anims, and the needed support for Diffuse/AO/Spec/Bump maps) , PLEASE TELL ME! I've read many complaints from many other 3rd party or just 3D enthusiast developers, it's just ridiculous...
Looking into U3D format now for the past week. It looked pretty good at first, but now I see it's yet another one of those. Difficult, and missing AO/Bump support, and it may likely die as a format... Bleh.
So here I am, with a decent 3D import/export API I made myself to attach exporters to, but no good format to hook into.
[/end rant]
So, what now? Well, I do have some tricks up my sleave so I'll head back into my dark corner and start working on it, and see where we end up. I WILL finish it, ffs...