   mesh hierarchy loading,do i need bones?
  i am working on getting some skeletal animation to my game(for both the sake of animation,and to be able to replace some meshes of the frame).but since i am going to use robot models, i am not realy sure i need skinning,and as far as i've seen i only need these bones for skinning. should i realy set up the bones anyway? is there any other use to them?   
  well if you want your vertices to be influenced by more then one Matrix you need them.If not you can simply multiply your Vertex by your FrameMatrix and then apply the WVP Multiplication and you should be fine. thats what i do if no skin weights are found in a given mesh :)   ;  well actually i am not going to use skinning at all.i kinda looked at some example of using skeletal animation and wondered if i need to set up the bones even though i will not do any skinning.   ;  In skeletal animation, you attach every vertex to a bone, and then you move the bones. That gives you smoother animations in theory, since it all looks more natural.if you're using skeletal animation, you need bones to animate, and you need to skin the mesh so that each vertex has one or more bone influences.You could try keyframe animation, which might work well for robots. Quake II (And the .md2 file format) uses keyframe animations, so the results are certainly reasonable.   ;  i see :)i can use keyframe animations with the x file and that function that comes with directx that loads it right?   