Egon, I know OBJ is ASCII rather than binary, but are you sure it's being read as quickly as possible? For static objects, OBJ is by far the most useful format that jpct reads (unlike 3DS, it's not improperly rotated and it doesn't have the 8.3 texture name limitation). Plus Max has an absolutely kick-ass exporter that converts and rescales all of its textures to your desired format. The problem is that it takes SO VERY LONG to import a 70,000-poly city with it.