[3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA]

as we actually care about performance at render time and direct X is sluggish at best.

Then you're probably not using it correctly (perhaps you're trying to read from video memory? or anything like that?), because rendertimes shouldn't really differ between D3D and OGL at all.

(it used to be like that in the old days, but not anymore)

[Feature request - Blender import / export]

Boy, am I glad you were not around when God was thinking about creating the world. The tought of Him having a conversation about the feasibility of the idea with you...

Surprisingly it's not your program we are discussing about. There are those who concentrate on doing stuff, and those who spend their time spilling the juice of their infinite wisdom to us lesser mortals.

Your attitude is something I am pretty familiar with amongst 14 year olds, and being an adult I refuse to take this conversation any further with you.

Well, let's stay away from the personal attacks and all the stuff about gods. We're not on a religious board here and despite our religions or having no religion at all, we're not here to flame each other either, right? However, because I understand your thinking, I'll try to explain according to my own experiences in writing an importer for .blend files.

The reason why it's nearly impossible to write an importer or exporter for .blend-files can be found in the structure of the files. The structure of a .blend-file consists of (like said before) a bunch of memory dumps from the actual data structures used in Blender itself.

This means the following: not only the model data is read/saved when you load/save a .blend-file. Other things like the size of a window, the window matrix, a number of internally used constants, and a lot of other things that actually make up Blender as it runs (the program and its data structures in memory), is read/saved into these files. So to actually read or write data to or from a .blend file, you would have to "emulate" Blender itself to fill in all the right values of the DNA structures used in Blender (remember, it's a memory dump, not just actual data like with other file formats).

That fact leaves one with just three options:

- Use the Blender source itself and spend a lifetime to trim away unneeded parts of the code, but to keep the DNA code.

- Or rewrite a part of Blender from scratch, according to the memory structures as used by Blender (those structures are GPL-ed code, so your code has to be GPL as well).

- Or think up a way to fill in a lot of default values to make the .blend file a valid file, but I can assure you it's just as much work as option 2 (but you'll still need those structures to be known, and the only source is the Blender source, which is GPL).

And there's the reason why no program imports or exports .blend files. It's not impossible, but definitely not worth the huge amount of work.