Editor Troubles

[TheGreatCthulhu]

Tnx. What I'm asking is how to import a brand new *.dae file containing an animation without the engine crashing - say, if you want to create a new character.
(And you're right - if you rename a *.dae_anim file back to *.dae, it can be imported into the model editor just fine.)

From the error log and the function call stack (and from the way Amnesia entities are constructed), I can see that Amnesia is basically reusing the COLLADA loader class used in HPL1, so I guess many, if not all, animation-related recommendations from the Penumbra content creation doc apply.

Namely, I find the following to be the most important:

When creating the skeleton for an object then the joints can NOT be rotated. You may only use translations for the initial placement. Rotation may be used in animations as normal though.

This is a bit vague. The grunt model definitely has the bones rotated in it's bind pose - otherwise, the bones couldn't have been aligned to the limbs. Maybe they meant not to rotate them after the skin is applied?

Then there's:

When using skeletal animations make sure that the skeleton root is at the root of the scene. If not, the engine will not find it.

By "root", does they mean that it shouldn't have a parent object, or that the mesh should be linked to it, or both?

This also:

Animation files: These files should contain exactly the same data as the main file except for colliders.

At the moment the engine cannot load animation data alone since it depends on whether the model is skinned or not and the placement of nodes. So the extra animation files must also contain all other data as the main file. However the animation files should not contain physics data like colliders. These should only be in the main file.

I noticed that when the animation is stopped in one of the grunt animation files in model viewer, the grunt assumes the bind pose... Is this pose stored in the file, too? Are there any special conventions, any reserved frames, or something?

In any case, studying the HPL1 implementation of the loader classes might provide some insight, so I'll take a look. But it will take time...
MeshLoaderCollada.h
MeshLoaderCollada.cpp
MeshLoaderColladaLoader.cpp

P.S. Nice job by you and pandemoneus on the wiki.