Hey all,

It's Aaron1178 from the Blender Nif Scripts team here. I'm here today, to announce that we are in the process of porting the Blender Nif Scripts over to the stable Blender 2.6.x series. I know it's been a while, and there has been a high demand for the release of these tools and I would like to say that we are doing our best to get a stable version released.

We currently have an alpha version of the scripts available. For more information please visit this thread in the Nif Tools Forum.

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3172

These scripts only import/export basic geometry, materials and UV textures.

For an initial road map of the in development Blender Nif Scripts, please view this thread in the Nif Tools Forum,

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3520&p=23978#p23978

A newer road map is underway and will be released once complete.

Bellow is a basic roadmap of the features I can think of that we have working. Don't worry, there will be more.

• Geometry Import / Export - Stable
  
• Materials (Normal Materials, Alpha, Specular, Stencil and Wireframe) Import / Export - Stable
  
• UV Textures (Normals, Glow Maps and Bumpmaps) Import / Export - Stable
  
• Vertex Coloring Import / Export - Stable
  
• Collisions (BoxShape, SphereShape and Triangle Mesh) Import / Export - Stable
  
• Group Mesh Import / Export - In Progress
  
• Sub Shape Import / Export - In Progress / Stable

Why has the development of the Blender Nif Scripts been slow you ask!

That is because Blender has changed its Python API significantly. So the scripts have had to be refactored into the new API. This has not always been a simple process, With the change in API, old methods(Functions) had been removed. So we've had to create workarounds to these problem.

Not just this, Amorilia and Neomonkeus sat down and decided to develop a testing framework that would allow for constant changes in the Blender API. This would allow us to run tests, when they fail, fixed the required code. Then we run these tests again until no errors are found.

Stay tuned, I'm sure another alpha release is soon around the corner.

Thanks,
Aaron1178

Awesome! Thanks for the update.