Unfortunately that's what alpha means, and why it's a bit more complex to use at the moment. Collada format showed up to be a bag of problems, and to get support for animations and other things we had to implement support for FBX format and direct our efforts there. FBX importer (ctrl+F7) now also converts the textures automatically to dds, which hasn't yet been ported back into the Collada importer.
You can read about the texture requirements for Collada on the
wiki. See the part about texture paths. If you can post the converted model and the textures, I'm sure people here will be able to help you.
Hopefully someone can also document the steps into the wiki - I'm sure there was a tutorial in a forum thread, but that gets lost easily.
Outerra has an interesting history. Features are mentioned, shown or even implemented......
And then they quietly disappear. I think this is another of those thing that was there for a while.....
Hmm, not sure what features you mean that have disappeared. In any case nothing disappeared from the importer, this awkwardness of use was there from the initial version.
Though I guess this was an unrelated sigh. Things that have been shown and are not yet in the public version - that's because we won't be releasing them until they work globally and to our satisfaction. They are more like concepts or tests, but often times there's a lot more effort needed to get them ironed out and out of the gates.
I guess we will be more cautious with it, especially wrt simulator fans who are in such quantum entangled state of wishes and doubts