> It sounds to me to be always the same arguments at the end (front-end tools > vs SDK extensibility). > We are already capable of writing a custom exporter but suffer from > inaccessible stuff. Why would I like the team > to provide me an ascii file format while opening more the SDK would allow me > to write my own + bring many other benefits in different areas other than > IE?
Getting the team to add APIs so that you can write your own custom format *instead* of doing an ASCII file format is just a wrong idea, imho. I just hate these types of "please do work on this" discussion where someone gets threatened by other development.. First, I think we actually already have those APIs anyway. I mean, crosswalk and the various format supports are written with the SDK and we even have apis to browse the connection stack. But more importantly, you'll never write a full replacement for the XSI scene format. It's never going to happen. You don't have the time, the technical know-how or interest to do all of the work of saving every bit in every corner of the software correctly and test that. And people do not want to download your custom format plug-in, assuming it would be free: they want the software to have it natively, tested and supported, otherwise they'll never use it. APIs are not related to problem in question here. Native ascii file format is about dealing with scene corruption, saving your ass on a deadline and the long term viability of Softimage assets in the future. That shader corruption in softimage 2011 nonsense would have never happened if the scene file format was opened and human readable. It doesn't make sense imho to put all this energy creating assets and then putting them in black box you can never look into.
