Any One Still Playing This Game?

[Fyron]

There are roughly 8 billion different formats for 3d models out there (far more than just Doga was used for SE4 shipsets), and it would be difficult to support all of them. It is far better overall to pick an industry standard, like the native DirectX model format. Something like 3ds would have worked, but would have raised the bar as far as actually making stuff for the game what with the whole $4000 modeling program and all.

Doga's format is not well suited for real time rendering in a game engine and probably should never be considered for such use. I'm not aware of any well-supported libraries for real time rendering either, unlike the more standardized formats (.x, 3ds). However, it is entirely possible to convert Doga models to .x format, and make use of them in SE5 (and even Starfury). They tend to be of rather high polygon count and need some reworking of texture info, but they can be made to work.

As far as I can tell, the only practical way to support Doga natively in the game would be to abandon all plans for 3d...