Thank you for your responses. Since I find viewmesh is working with the models packaged with Planeshift, this now seems to be a "not for these forums" issue; even if viewmesh is unable to handle some legitimate Cal3D models, it's irrelevant as I'm going to need CrystalSpace compliance and viewmesh does seem to be providing that. Apologies for the mispost. As it happens, the error I'm most consistently seeing with a variety of models known to be valid is a crash of the "pure virtual function" kind, with no console output preceding it other than that it's attempting to load the *.cfg file. I haven't yet tracked down just what is causing the breakdown, but will get around to it.

Wired_Crawler: Both links are to more recent versions of the export script that I've been working on. Neither of those versions works for me either, even after reapplying my current set of fixes for the problems all three scripts seem to have in common, but since thier output with my test model is doing completely different things to viewmesh (including one OS crash), it's more information to work with.

For the moment I'm inclined to use what I've got so that I can get back to coding; the export script I'm using can now definitely export meshes cleanly and I don't actually need skeletons or animations right now. If I ever get an export script modified to the extent of fully working on my own installation of Blender and Python, I'll provide it here so that people can see if it breaks on theirs. Otherwise, thanks again and bye for now.

What I'd like is a slash command to toggle (or two to set) handedness. At the moment this requires one extra bit in sending information about a character's appearance and one transform inserted into the right place in the rendering pipeline. In the future I'd imagine it could make a few visual emote animations a bit harder to create or code for if they include objects with a clear left and right like books. It might also be nice if at some point in the future a few NPCs and/or mobs were left-handed.

I'd think the reason would be fairly obvious. This feature is conspicuous in its absence in virtually every computer RPG, MMO or otherwise, although it's arguably only really noticeable in ones like PlaneShift with a 3D, graphical, third-person interface. There are one or two MMORPGs where the lack of left-handedness makes some development if not setting sense. The Matrix Online would need to do enormous amounts of work to design a whole new set of combat animations for left- vs. right-handed fighting. City of Heroes/Villains would at least need to ensure decals and emblems stayed unmirrored, mess with some of those emotes I mentioned above, and transform some of the power animations (it could take a developer a day or so to go over all of them). However, it's just as irritating there, especially given the amount of effort these commercial products have expended to allow for customizing characters by gender, racial features, and even physical build. And with multiple sentient species inhabiting a universe, it seems even odder that every last one of them is universally right-handed.

At the moment, for this game, there isn't much value in the feature (although I'd imagine there are players right now who'd like to be able to hold a mining pick in their right hands). But also right now it wouldn't be hard to add.