Hiya.

I did say:

Of course, each of these could have a little check-box for "Always convert to this type?", so once I tell A8 I want to always convert to .ogg, it will always convert any sound file to .ogg.



This way, once you had decided that you know what you want (ex: always convert your .fbx into .mdl), you just check off that little box and it would never ask you if you wanted to convert it...it would automatically do it for you. No muss, no fuss.

While it is nice to not have to click a "hundred times", it's even more frustrating to import your .fbx file, have it show up in MED, save it as .mdl, then when you put it in your level you get some vague error or, worse, no error at all...it just shows up with no texture (or no animation, or facing up/down when it should be facing forward, etc.). As an artist, you then have to go hunt around to try and figure out what and where your import went wrong...was it your texture format? Your texture size? The bit-depth of the texture? Or was it your UV map? Did you model program use the left or right hand method for XYZ coordination and how will that affect your animation?

One of the primary reasons I gave up on A7 was the *painful* asset importing (especially animated and textured models).

I suppose the only other alternative would be to have an actual help file that tells you exactly what you can import into A8 and what the parameters need to be. It's all fine and dandy to say "To use a normal map you have to apply a shader", but when there is almost no information on just *how* to apply that shader, where you can get that shader, where to put that shader in your file structure, what you can/can't apply that shader too, and what formats said shader textures need to be in, along with any special naming conventions... well, it becomes a guessing game. One that I've lost over and over. I have succeeded sometimes, then reproduce exactly what I did before with a different model, only to have it not work for god knows whatever reason.

Anyway, this is turning into a rant from me, so I'll shut up now.