VBGamer

How about this... To speed up loading, create your own file format. Create a seperate program that will open the animation file for you and extract all of the information into usable D3DIM vertices. Then save the vertex information in a file (use Binary, it's quicker). Once it's in a file, you can load the binary file directly into your engine. This is what I used in my engine. I saved the vertex info in a UDT that made up a mesh and basically all I had to do was 'Get FileNum, 1, Mesh' where Mesh was a UDT I had in my engine that would describe the vertices of a mesh. I never did this with animated X files but it shouldn't be much harder. FYI, I was able to load like 400 X files each with 1800 vertices in a few seconds...