I'm full of questions now that I've decided to get back to editing.

Has anyone done any serious animating in Milkshape? Human body animations especially. If its animation capabilities are good I might consider writing a plugin to export bone anims to keys. Which leads me to the next question:

How convenient is it to program Milkshape's plugin interface? I know a couple of 3do related plugins have been written for it in the past, is translating 3do data to native Milkshape data a straightforward task?

Milkshape has ALWAYS been a ***** to write plugins for. I myself don't know, as I've never written plugins for it, but anyone who's tried has always complained about Milkshape.

But I really don't want that to stop you. If you could pull this off, I'd love you to death. Milkshape's animations are straight foreward and rather easy to do.

And I have no idea how you'd do this. Care to give me a pseudo code idea? I'm rather confused.

You might want to consider Blender for 3DO editing and animation. It's a lot more powerful, completely free and probably not such a ***** to write plugins for.

As best I remember the plugin I wrote for milkshape that handled both model data and animations was very easy to write. Plugins in general aren't that fun to do, and milkshape's interface isn't especially wonderful, but it won't give you brain aneurysms trying to learn it like 3dsmax will. The main thing is that because milkshape is such a simple program by comparison, it is easy to figure out.

As for how capable milkshape is for animation...that's really not much of an issue, considering that you are exporting to...per mesh keyframes
Milkshape does skeletal animation, in its most lackluster form, limiting you to a single bone per vertex (no blending between bones), but that is still well beyond keyframes. You'll just need some method of aggregating this down to keyframe animations.

Thanks for the replies. As far as an I can tell (though I'm no expert), converting bone anim data to mesh anim data should be pretty straightforward, since bone = mesh more or less - one bone per vertex is the same as one mesh per vertex, which is how JK handles it. Correct me I'm wrong though. All I'd need is a model with a skeleton, the anims would play with mesh deformation within Milkshape but come out in good-ol' puppet style in JK.

As for Blender, I've never used it... is there an existing 3do import plugin for it though? Not that it's crucial though... the model I'll use to animate won't need to be exported (as long as I have an ingame model with identical joint hierarchy).