I almost quit one week into aerial antics because the art pipeline was rubbish. Not even vertex color support in any tools let alone extra UV's and lightmaps (even though the file format supported them).
That's what I am trying to explain. Most people here don't understand the importance of a 3D pipeline because never even reached this stage of development (there aren't many 3D artists around here, and nearly all the community is formed by lonewolf coders). This way you miss the biggest share of the development community, being almost everything graphically driven these days.
Even the idea of creating a game editor is mostly covered by 3d modelling packages today (in Burnout 3 the developers came to the point of using Lightwave for AI and traffic simulations directly in the layout editor). Mark is right, he doesn't have to do everything on his own... that's why he should support other existing tools for the job though! Most of the needs today are covered by existing tools, and I see Max3D as a glue for them. In the past I also wondered why going the world editor route with Maplet when modellers were taking place of these limited editors at the time (and now completely replaced them): with good exporters he could have said "get one of these modellers: here there are the instructions for importing media into B3D" getting the best out of it and truly allowing to add content to the engine.
Mark Sibly: I don't know if you are already confident on the subject, but if not you should take a grasp of the current possibilities offered by todays scene editors/modellers in order to see how further you could go toward the game editor goal with lesser headscratching and without having to write it for yourself, just by integrating existing systems.