Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
you can use the "Tempest" plugin for gmax to export models as an MD3 which most converters will then easily switch to 3ds for you. (belive 3D Object Converter does).