Hi Jonah,

> Ahhh. I see. So what's the deal with their current primary format?
> No other software is able to I/O that one?

They've never documented their primary format.

Basically they set it up as just a container for plug-in data, and plug-ins do all the work reading and writing stuff to the file. So they claim that you can't read the format without the plugins running, that's basically the excuse anyway.

It's a somewhat valid excuse for some things, but also somewhat bogus as well, because there are some common standard plugins that ship with Max which provide basic mesh objects and stuff like that. So it would certainly be possible for them to document at least a core set of information.

But they heavily advise people to write plug-ins to run inside of Max to deal with .max files instead of supporting anyone trying to read or write the format from an external application. So that's what everyone does.

- Michael