Zini wrote:but they could perhaps benefit from being turned into an Ogre Resource (so they can remain loaded between transitions, its data can be shared directly instead of copied (e.g. the keyframe/animation data), and get freed automatically when they're not needed and a memory budget/limit is reached).
That sounds like a very interesting idea.
This is exactly what I thought of yesterday, as long as OpenMW loads .nif files directly there will be resource waste, but after 1.0 we can implement behaviour for on-the-fly resource convertion and caching in some directory so the engine does not have to load .nif files and convert them to Ogre-compliant format, but load them directly instead.