I've been converting static objects from .X files to my own custom binary format. This has worked fine but I want to go skeletal. The thing is, I want to have the bone data and vertex weight data in the same file as the model but have the bone animations exported seperately. I believe that .X contains all the bone/vertex weight information already but is there any way to export bone animations from 3DS Max (version 7 by the way)? Thanks

If you have some programming experience (I'm guessing you do) writing an exporter in MAXScript is easier than you'd think. If you'd rather write an importer in some other language, the MD5 format (used in DOOM3) is a simple ASCII skinned format where bindpose and skeleton are stored in a different file than the animation.