2.5d games

Hello, I would be interested in buying Visionaire to develop a game in 2.5d but reading in the forum I see that 4.2.5 version has a serious problem with 3D characters. Do you have an estimate of the time to solve the problem?
In any case, I tried version 4.2 which should instead go but I have big problems when loading the model, Visionaire slows so impressive and although I can launch the game the character can not see and the mouse goes in spurts.
These characters are .x and .dae format and AssimpView displays them normally.
The polygon numbers I tried ranging from 30000 to 1000
Perhaps is it necessary to activate some option that I missed?
A question, Visionaire does not require the hidden geometry to use 3d models?
Thank you

Valter

One of the members on here (the only member to successfully implement characters, as far as I'm aware), AkcayKaraazmak, typed up a guide on exactly what he did to get 3D characters to work for his game. It's floating around somewhere, or you could try sending him a personal message.

As for the 3D section of VS, yes it's broken in the current public build & no I don't have an estimated release date. I asked Simon for one the other day / week & he just said he wasn't sure when the next release would be. They are currently working on something at the minute, as well as the new GUI.

By the way... does the slowdown you mentioned always occur or only when you have 3D characters loaded? Does your machine lag in any of the demo games available on the page where you downloaded VS from?

Thank you for your answer.
I had already read the guide that you speak and skipping the part about modeling (I'm not good at modeling so I use ready-made templates for my test). I imported these models in 3ds max and exported by following his instructions. I have tried many models, both .dae that .x, I have also tried to load a .OBJ without animation and export it as .x but any results.
My PC is an Intel I3 with 8Gb RAM and Seven 64bit but I have also tried all this on another pc.
The slowdown happens only after loading the character 3d, 2d is fluid.
The version of Visionaire is 4.2 build 1183
Wintermute engine with the same .x characters are fine.

You turn ambient occlusion to 0, that costs much performance.

Did u export the model with bones and animations as .x? If your 3d character has huge frames of animations then its makes Vis fps down. For example try your ideal loop animation about max 200 frames or less and walk loop for 50. Make sure that the total frames of animations are not more then 400 or less. I also had low fps and loading times when I had too much frames for animations. Also the second important point is the resolution of the textures. Keep them maximum 1024x1024 .png files. The lowest spect pc, I tested my demo was i3 with 4gb ram and I didnt have any issues.

Beside these yea Vis has some issues with 3d stuff. Like character turnings and multiple character animations. For example when u use extra char animations like take, sit, jump etc... char plays those animation in a loop which it should play them just once. But to have your character just walk and stand idle is ok with Vis now.

I'm everyday checking the forum if Simon made an update for 3d stuff ... But I beleive that Simon will save us from these issues one day

By the way what is the size of your model in MB? Mines are between 8K to 10K. Higher ones can kill the fps. Try not to use heavy models.

Ok, using a low poly character .x about 5K textured 512 and putting Ambient Occlusion to 0 as suggested by Simons, Vis does not slow down and the character is visible and moves in the game ...
A question, I see that for the 3d character in Walk animations section is of course not present the setting for the direction (Right, Up Right, etc.) and I have put only "walk".
But when I do move my character it seems to move only in eight directions giving a bad impression of movement. I something wrong or is it so?

I think by default the direction compass is set to 45 degrees. You can change this under: extras > options > settings: "precision for direction selection (in º)". However I do not know if this will automatically affect the amount of directions your 3D character will have - I'm not savvy on the 3D stuff & I've not tested it.

P.S: 16 directions would be 22.5 degrees, but the option I mentioned above does not accept decimal values (currently). You could try 12 directions (30º) or 24 directions (15º) - I have no idea if this require more processing power / ram / vram (whatever) to run your game mind.

I have tried, no effect :/
I have idea that Visio is a great application to manage 2D but for the 2.5d there are still several things to fix.
I hope that the 2.5d will be taken into greater consideration in the future because the 2.5d adventures are very well-liked by players (and the programmers :-) )

3D support is relatively new to Visionaire Studio, I'm sure it will progress in time.

Personally I'm not a fan of 2.5D - what does it matter if your character can project shadows & be affected by light sources if there's only one light source position & no other 3D surfaces to refract? If you are using it for the simple purpose of more fluid character animations then, sure, whatever. We also have Spine support (2D sprite parts with bone & key frame events - I think) for fluid looking character animations - they are supposedly scriptable via Lua script also.

I looked at the 3D-model-wiki and I thought: that's too complicated :-) Three or five tools to convert from one format to another... If I use Cinema, I will use it for animation too, why should I use Blender...?

The only advantage might be: I get a 3D-model to walk with, maybe smoother, but such a prize I have to pay for... No real shadows (because there are no 3D-objects, only the character), no keyframe or point animations (which are my favourite tools to animate mimics), no subsurface scattering, no hair, no dispacement (without them I need some other way to make reliefs, does normals work?), no bone rigging, no hypernurbs.

I think: it's a dead end to me.

I think, it's easier to change the whole scene for different lights, effects and use pre-rendered frames from the favourite 3D-program... sorry.

Machtnix