I'm not sure what the "problems" you are talking about that NCsoft has "fixed" in the importer since we use ColladaImporter straight as-is from jME cvs.
The problem is that I can't find a working path from modelling tools (like 3ds Max or Maya) to jMonkeyEngine, that would support animations. NCSoft has solved that problem by creating a custom exporter. Since FeelingCollada is now open source, it makes sense for me to (at least try) rewrite/fix ColladaImporter. However, fixing ColladaImporter would probably break compatibility with NCSoft exporter, therefore I decided to write custom importer for FeelingCollada (reusing a lot from existing importer, of course).
i think hevee is working on an xml system that supports morphing.
but its not true that there isnt a working path from 3dsmax or maya to jme. there r currently 2 working md5 importers for jme that work fine. im the developer of the newer one and im using it for my own skeleton animation from maya and 3d max since my artists use both.
The ColladaImporter should not break by adding support for the FeelingSoft exporter. As I understand it, all the problems have to do with unsupported "features" that FeelingSoft exporter utilizes that the ColladaImporter doesn't support. This would only be handling of Collada functionality that doesn't currently exist so adding complete support for FeelingSoft should be possible without breaking anything that ncSoft uses (or anyone else for that matter).
I'm a big believer in Collada if we could just get the ColladaImporter to support more of the common features used by 3DS and Maya. Personally I think we could all rely on Collada and not have to deal with all these partial implementations that don't support as much.
Yeah, DF's right. afaik, the only thing real special about our importer that would need to be taken into consideration in a new importer is that it supports pluggable handlers for custom handling of Collada's "extra" tags.
I work in a company which use jME and 3DSMax and we have the same problems as many people here with conversion between 3DSMax and jME. We try lots of format (RTX, 3DS, md5, …) but no-one is pretty good for our work (model with animations, but no bones for example).
Collada seems to be good but work correctly only with NCSoft exporter.
So is there any possibility to get this exporter, even if we must pay it ? Do you have any contacts at NCSoft to get it ? (I speak to NCSoft developpers)