Plans to try and convert normals to sharp edges have been shelved given that work is currently underway to add full support for custom normals to Blender. Once that arrives it will (unsurprisingly) be trivial to import normals.

The new smoothing system is still based on marking edges as sharp, so didn't change anything with regard to importing.

Face normals are compared too.

I don't need any files to fix it, and unless something more urgent crops up it will be in the next release.

There is actually already code in the SMD importer for this situation. It's having an effect (try selecting all verts then running remove doubles yourself!) but evidently more work is needed. Comparing weightmap data as well as vertex location should sort the problem out.

It wouldn't be anywhere else. :)

Thanks, fixed it.[steamreview.org]

2.2 adds support for this feature.

That isn't a huge improvement over the normal workflow. You can very easily create a shell script which makes vtex compile every new/altered TGA in your materialsrc folder.

You may be interested in my GIMP plug-in though.[code.google.com]

Incidentally, the limit in Source 2 is four weights per vertex. The new model compiler will truncate anything over that automatically (and actually tell you that it's done so!).

I've added a new scene option that enables culling of weight links below a given strength. I didn't use Limit Total itself because it only works on weightmapped meshes (the Tools also support subsurf, text, envelopes etc.) and because it deletes all excess weight links regardless of their strength.

This is not the place for general help with using Blender. Ask at the Blender Tutorial Community instead.