http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=8224901
Just wondering if this is anywhere in the thought process. This could promote interoperability with Maya and other Autodesk standard tools.
Are you volunteering to write the loader? Welcome aboard!
Aside… I have not heard anyone mention this format before, so I don't believe its on anyone todo list.
You can use the FBX format to inter-operate between Maya and 3dsmax, once you're done, you just export to a jME-compatible format 
No reason to write an importer in jME I think.
in a way the FBX standard sounds like it has more 'stuff' that it can do than collada…
(and we all know how easy it is to get a good collada importer going)
FBX and Collada are equivalent. When you export a Collada file in 3DSMax, the authoring tool is "FBX COLLADA exporter" in the XML.
Good to know.
FBX != Collada, although they basically fill the same need…
FBX is technology and a file format (.fbx) owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications.
COLLADA defines an open standard XML schema for exchanging digital assets among various graphics software applications that might otherwise store their assets in incompatible formats.
(I believe 3DS-Max, which is an Autodesk product, utilizes the FBX format to export to Collada; probably so they only need one Collada exporter for all their products…)
Wiki links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBX
probably outdated info but still… we used the fbx format a while when I was at Jadestone, and at least back then the fbx format was a closed format, and the only way to use it without trying to decode it manually was to use their C SDK. We built an executable that imported fbx and wrote out to our own format…
If that is still true I would just use it to go between tools, just like momoko says.