What is the best image format for textures for 3d characters?

Hi guys,

What is the best image format for the textures of the 3d characters in Visionaire? I read that png are the best for images but for textures also? Cause I still have the 3d character problems in the game. Game sometimes crushes and sometiems not its almost impossible for me to understand that what causes the problem? When I click run it work and for examples next time I click run without chaning anything in editor, it runs and immidietly close itselve :\ ... I think its not giving this error much if I delete the textures and use the character without textures in the game. Thats why I asked the best image format for Visionaire.

Is there also a setting to optimize the ram/resources for the 3d stuff in Vis? Like to allocate more memory for 3d in runtime.

Thank you

Well I decided to stick with a 2D characters for my first game. It seems that we need 1-2 years of regular updates to have a confident and comfortable support of 3D characters in Visionaire. It is just my opinion of course. Anyway the fact that final game will not crush is crucial for me. But in order to have a more camera angles / perspectives to fake 2.5D feature I will just render a multiple sprites of my characters with a different camera position in my 3D soft and I will load them in VS via character outfits. It's bad thing for the memory usage I know because there will be a hundreds of images just for one character but better something than nothing, right? So I think you can do Syberia-style 2.5D game just with a regular 2D graphics.

Just break your character down into multiple characters/outfits, then it doesn't matter so much about the amount of image files used for your character.

The only real difference between using 3D models & 2D versions of the 3D models is that you don't have the dynamic lighting or shadows that you get with the 3D models but I don't really rate the shadows generated by the 3D models anyway as they don't refract when hitting walls/objects because there is nothing for them to hit. - I suppose 3D also has smaller file size, but whatever...

We could technically add dynamic lighting to 2D characters too but it involves using a combination of normal maps & depth maps etc, which VS currently doesn't support.

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then it doesn't matter so much about the amount of image files used for your character

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That is a good news. Because I really love the camera work in 2.5D's Grim Fandango and Syberia and I would like to have a similar camera work (or cinematography if you will) in my game even it's just a sprite based without dynamic light. If you have just one character perspective with one camera perspetive for all yours backgrounds it just look like a theatre stage, right? Bad immersion for player I think.
And we could also fake the lighting effects with Shader Toolkit just a little, like Pyke did with his flash-light sample - it's beautiful.

Yes there are workarounds with normal maps and stuff, check out this XNA dude:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFbNqYkD1r4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww

Just a bit more work on your part if you want to use different camera perspectives. Hopefully Simon will be able to add shader support for individual objects/characters in a future release as you would be able to get pretty creative with your light that way...

I wonder if you could use the spotlight thing now to generate specific lighting on a character based on position of character on the scene. Set a specific position for light source & then do some calculations each time character moves which updates shader light parameters. Would be interesting to look into. Normal maps & depth maps look like they involve a ton of additional work to sort them out.

So guys could we say that 3d characters are still buggy in Visionaire? Even on the latest update, its written that 3d character import issues are solved

well they are marginally improved since last version. I still think it will take a while for the devs to iron out all kinks. 3D support was recently added to an engine that has pretty much been exclusively a 2D engine for the past 10 years or so. I'm sure they will iron it out more with each new update...

P.S: even the 2D side of the engine is not without bugs, nor is it 100% stable. With each update & each new feature 10 new bugs seem to crop up. Cycle of development I guess?

Hope they will do it mate

Please send us your model file so we can have a look at it. Without any data we have no chance of fixing the issue. For textures the same format should be used as for normal 2d images (png and webP).

The same applies to any crashes, please send us the dmp-file (found in the directory of log/ini files in user dir).

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Just a bit more work on your part if you want to use different camera perspectives. Hopefully Simon will be able to add shader support for individual objects/characters in a future release as you would be able to get pretty creative with your light that way...

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I think that's already possible and only needs documentation (VObjectShaderSet field) - but I'm not 100% sure. This has to be answered by Simon

Thank you Alex I will send it you soon