Wrong. Both, FBX and Collada are standard formats for gameneeds nowadays.

No im- and exporter cares about the polycount nor if it was made to transfer to movies or games. It transfers data. And the data is in both case the same. It makes no difference. Vertices, Texturevertices, Normals, plus materials and animation information ...

In theory maybe in practice it is an other thing

Just compare FBX \ COllada and MilkShape specs and you will see what I mean

I have never had a problem to export an animated file from Fragmotion or MilkShape into 3dgs but quite often the same file does not work if converted into FBX file format

Make it simple , this is a general rule

Well of course it is what I meant....

I would like that Indie game engines support the real cheap alternatives rather than the professional file format

As you said , the results are about the same but you can give your little contribution in the war against piracy while supporting the small software houses

The author of " PaceMaker " gave it up and it was an excellent animator package
this is sad

Well, that is of course a problem sometimes. But it is a special pipeline problem between the used FBX version and the target software then. I would blame the target software here, or the app/plugin hat has written the FBX. Or even the chosen FBX format. There is more than one. And there are various settings too. But not FBX in general



Milkshape is a bit too simple and limited for my flavour ...

Well I am not so interested in whom I must blame
I know that quite often these complicated file format do not work while the benefits of using them, for an indie game developer, is negligible

Wouldn't call Animation neglibile

FBX is a file format. It has its pros, it has its cons. That's it

Doesnt' MillkShape file format support animations ?
Even weights

I could never model or rig in Milkshape, let alone animate, that's for sure. That would be simply ways too limited for me

As far as I know this has little to do with the file format by itself

MS3D is simple because it has been designed for low poly objects only
It contains information about vetices displacement, bones, U.V. coord etc
FBX include much more information , a lot of them being of no use for game programming

A part from that, priority number one is reliability and FBX is not 100 % reliable regardless of the responsable for the bugs in the pipe line

You miss the point, maybe i was unclear. Why should i go the extra route across the Milkshape format when my 3D package can export to FBX and this is a working pipeline? Even more when by Milkshape some of my informations gets lost because its format is a bit too simple here and there ...



And what exactly do you mean here? Name me one