HIVE

Nevermind, I figured it out, I was writing SkinWeights without curly braces around them I'm also omitting vertex groups when empty, but they are required by RMS, so I'll just print them anyway.

edit: wth, now model checker is failing to read it
edit 2: MDL files saved with RMS also fail in the model checker. I guess I gotta choose which I want to be compatible with. Or add an option for users to choose.
edit 3: model viewer fails to parse even when empty Vertex Groups are omitted. I guess there's some other reason why it fails.
edit 4: ahhhhhhhhhhhh, I figured it out. Hive model viewer expects skinweights WITHOUT curly braces, that's why I had it that way. RMS expects skinweights WITH curly braces.

Sorry for the spam, but to clarify/summarize:

• RMS: requires empty VertexGroups, requires curly braces around SkinWeights
• Hive: works with or without empty VertexGroups, requires NO curly braces around SkinWeights.

Somehow I overlooked these messages.

It's been tough with MDL because the RMS parser for MDL version 800 was based on files made with the Blizzard leaked converter from 2001. That allowed me to convert MDX files to MDL and vice versa, so that I could be fairly confident the MDLs that I was creating were valid and matched the game's supported MDL format as well.

By contrast, when Reforged launched there was only one leaked MDL 900 file included in the game database. Many months -- maybe a year after Reforged released -- someone here on Hive posted a decompiled MDL spec that was closer to accurate. But in my experience, especially with Reforged HD graphics, the MDLs made by Ghostwolf's viewer were able to open directly in World Editor where as the MDLs saved by Retera Model Studio were not. And I had a horrible time trying to figure out why.

Now that Microsoft leaked the debug build of Reforged with all the checks and alerts included, including MDL parsing errors, as well as their inhouse toolchains and converters, it would probably be much easier to verify this. I would imagine you could do similar to what I did with MDX 800 and just convert a bunch of models to and from MDL and become extremely familiar with which outputs from a tool are correct or incorrect. Have you tried that? If it leads you to any obvious errors that com from Retera Model Studio MDL outputs, or models that Retera Model Studio cannot parse, now that we have a source of truth like that I would totally support fixing my side. But until this year, what I always told people was that MDL for Reforged was basically a giant unknown, and that unless you want to damage or lose data it was only safe to load from an MDL using the same tool that had written to it when dealing with version 900 through 1100 (now 1200).