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It is often not very useful to load editor internal files because they have too much useless information stored. Just figure the correct options for your exporters and use the latest Irrlicht from SVN or the loader patches from my webpage. There are several enhancements for the file types mentioned.
Which editor file?
In fact I did not check it yet, but it shoudl be getMesh("something.irr") just like to other files.
BTW: If you have a good maa file specification you can do the loader yourself, exisiting and working mesh file loaders have a good chance to be added to the core...
3ds had been undocumented for probably 15 years, but almost every tool doing 3d graphics supported the format to some extent. So just because the format is proprietary does not mean that is cannot be supported.
As far as I remember, .mb files are nothing different than .ma files, but stored in binary form instead of as text. The problem: To implement a .ma/.mb importer, you would need to reimplement the whole MEL envionrment, and that's pretty senseless and would be really a lot of work. Editors able to import those files need a installed maya and just use the maya .dlls, not an option for Irrlicht, of course.