Quote - Just curious what you mean by new file format. Will it be binary or script-like (like Poser). If it is script, Poser ignores anything in the file it doesn't understand. For example, I can produce my props in Poser 4, then do Poser 7 specific tweaks in the P7 material room... then simply move the P7 shaders to the P4 file .. now the file is compatible to both P4 and P7. P4 doesn't understand the shaders and, thus, ignores them.

Of course, it will depend on how large any script type file would be since we know that binary doesn't have to be interpreted and, therefore, is much faster. What I would have liked to seen in Poser is a compiler. That would be a content developers dream come true. You'd be able to still do all your edits by hand but compile the final file for actual use in Poser by the end user.

 
Actually the format I have in mind will be based on the Collada standard, it will be a slightly modified version of Collada - however FAST will have the ability to save (and even package) in poser format as well, it's just that Poser will not allow you to use some of the more advanced abilities I have in mind for FAST.

For example, one of the features I'd like FAST to be able to have is applying subdivision modeling to a mesh on the fly - so you can use much lower poly meshes and still have them look like they are much higher poly models.  In the FAST file format, a flag can be set to indicate whether or not this particular mesh should have sub-d applied, and if so how many iterations, etc, so you can animate with low poly meshes and have much higher poly output when it comes time to render.

Posers file format was never designed with this in mind, so if you want to export this to Poser, Fast will first have to apply the sub-d to the mesh, create a new object file, and then generate CR2 or PP2 that points to the new object.  I plan on giving FAST this capability, however FAST is reallly meant as a Poser replacement.

So while it will package Poser content for you, it's not really designed from the ground up with this function in mind, it's more of a bonus really.  My goal is to give people an open source program that can do everything Poser can do and more, one that will run on either Linux or Windows and possibly even Mac OSX.

So while FAST will be able to read and even write Poser content, it will not use Posers file formats as it's native format.  Instead it will use the xml format designed for Collada, probably with a few extensions for some of it's special features.

I could give some thought to a "compiler" as you describe for FAST, though I'm not a content developer myself so I'd be curious to know what sort of benefits you'd be looking for from such a compiler,

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...