   what is all that X-File data
  HiIam making my own 3d-format by just removing everything I don't want from an X-file, but its many parts of an X-file I don't understand, many of the templates are obvious but the documentation is quite bad so some things I just don't understand.1. What is a Frame, I've an example X-file and it haves a whole hierarchy of frames, and each frame just consists of a matrix and a new frame. Why would I want that?2. Can an X-file contain more then one mesh, if yes: what exactly is a mesh and what is the X-file able to describe?3. Why isn't animation data a part (child data) of the mesh?a link to a good documentation would also be great!thanks   
  hi, I've been working on using xfiles for other data as well, I think they are not *that difficult* to use, but it is quite difficult to figure out how they go together, you have to use ID3DXFILE and LPD3DXFILEDATA etc to manuelly save stuff. ToyMaker has some info on this.http://www.toymaker.info/index.htmlFor other general xfile stuff you could try doing a search for; Andy Pike, Frank Luna etc. (Hopefully some other people can give good links).I don't know how much xfile stuff you have done but I think you should start with looking at the "meshes" tutorial in the sdk, also open up tiger.x in notepad or something and try to see how it fits together, you can find out what the different parts mean by looking up xfile templates in the sdk docs.   ;  I'm no expert but keep in mind that an X-file has a lot of legacy semantics that aren't used anymore.There's a big push to shaders these days... Depends what you want to do.   ;  I am thinking that once you start adding custom data to save in an .x file, how much more work would it really be to just write your own file format?  If you use the ID3DXFile interfaces to build/parse them, and you have added custom data, there is no way someone else could load that custom data unless they have your templates and actual code to load the custom data into your data structures.  It is not as if you can register a new template and then have DirectX do the actual work of parsing it for you.I have seen a tutorial that show how to parse the .x file and look for meshes, and then use the D3DXLoadMeshFromXOf function.  And there are several that show how to use the D3DXLoadMeshHierarchyFromX with your own ID3DXAllocateHierarchy class to load skinned meshes with animations.  Neither shows how to deal with custom data, and even if you made them work with custom data, you would not just be able let someone else use your code as a plug-in to theirs so that they could load .x files you created in their program.So, I think it would ultimately be easier to write something from scratch.  That way you could write it as a DLL or plug-in that someone else could actually use to load your meshes with your custom data.  My opinion would be different if MS would actually provide documentation on how to use the ID3DXFile interfaces or how to use the ID3DXSaveUserData class with the D3DXSaveMeshHierarchyToFile function.  But they don't wanna do that.;  As you can see in many 3d modeling software the scene can be organized in a hierarchical way and what frame is about.So the frame can hold other frames and can hold a mesh as well ,and this is the way to have many meshs in the same xfile.And each set of animation keys for different meshs can be organized as an AnimationSet (like walking or firing) so these AnimationSets can be mixed later using AnimationController class in Direct3D to have a complex animation.   ;  Check these urls:http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/dataformats/directx/#xfilefrm_Frameshttp://www.xbdev.net/3dformats/x/file_specs/DX113Spec.doc   