New Version of Visioniare?

there won't be any 3d-models of the world. If you really need a super realistic 3d environment with correct shadows and lighting it is probably better to use a 3d engine. Besides the effort to create a full 3d engine (which we can't handle) it would be too complicated to use anyway. Visionaire should be easy to use for everybody and still allow to create high quality games.

Daniel implemented the 3d characters as part of a university project and also wrote a very good and detailed paper about it. If you're interested you can find more information about the implementation here:
http://www.supremer.de/visionaire.pdf

Wow that paper looks great. I can't wait for 2.5D feature in the next Visionaire version mainly because of better animation blending possibilities over the 2D glitchy "walk-and-stop-in-one-frame" thing..

no, currently the characters are 2d only... you could create your characters in a 3d program & then export each character animation out in individual frames in png format & then import them into VS.

The 2.5d support would allow you to actually import your 3d character models (not sure which format(s) will be supported) into VS in which you could then use the 2.5d tool in VS to add dynamic lighting, shadows, rotation & various other stuff to your characters. Technically you could (probably) import 3d objects too (as characters) to use in your scenes, I think?

I'm not sure 2.5d will be released with next version.

Really that is the ONLY thing that bothers me in Visionaire. Character animation blendings. You could be the best animator in the world and you could have beautifully polished animations, but in Visionaire it would looks like a crap anyway and you can't do nothing about it

It's only the walk animations that seem to vibrate for some reason; all other animations seem to play nice & smooth. The devs are reworking the walk system a little bit but I'm not sure whether or not the vibrating walk animation issue will be fixed or not. As far as I'm concerned the entire walk system should be replaced for one that allows us to create begin, mid & end walk & run animations with individual leg control that works based on ground contact as opposed to having to mess about for ages getting the pause value between frames & the character speed correct to prevent the character from looking like it is moonwalking/gliding across the screen. Having said that I would also like to see character rotation & up to 16 character directions by default....

Um yeah I doubt any of that will happen anytime soon as it would well probably delay next release for another year or something, but one can hope!

you can already create more character directions: extras - options - settings - Precision for direction selection

Simon is currently reworking the walk system so the character walk animations should be easier to adjust and look smoother (no more moonwalk).

While I agree that a perfect walk animation should consist of begin,mid and end animations, I can't see how this is going to work. As seen in many games even "simple" walk animations use a huge amount of memory. Games with animations with many frames (e.g. 30 or 50, sometimes even 100) can easily consume hundreds of MB just for character animations (especially if the game uses a high resolution, as it is common nowadays). If the character animations are doubled or tripled this will become a huge problem for sure.

Of course everything changes with 3d-characters. Almost no additional memory is needed for additional animations so it would make perfect sense to have different animations for walking. But this is already planning two steps ahead.

If you are using 3D-models in the current version, the way would have been to export all animations as pictures and then having them frame by frame. That's the problem, because these animations can't be to big. But that's the way everyone does it here. With the 2.5D option you wouldn't need to do that anymore, you just need to export your model in an appropriate format (that's working with Open Asset Importer), and the animations prepared.

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you can already create more character directions: extras - options - settings - Precision for direction selection

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Oops I never noticed that in Settings before Alex mate

I just tested it & it doesn't support decimal degree values as only valid characters allowed are numbers... could you please change it so we can add .values please? (for instance: I think 16 directions works out at 22.5 degrees?)

360 / 16 = 22.5
360 / 8 = 45
360 / 4 = 90
etc...

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Of course everything changes with 3d-characters. Almost no additional memory is needed for additional animations so it would make perfect sense to have different animations for walking.

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Oh god can I help somehow? I mean I would pay for this feature really. Do you have some donation program or something like that? I mean I just hate standing here and waiting, still I'm not a programmer, but come one - this single one dude "I'm working after my day job" who made Wintermute Engine already have 3D characters support. Just say what I can do to help!

I am curious how the situation is evolving, in the discussion about version 4 was said that something new will be released in few days, but after that it was nothing posted for a while and this thread got on the 3rd page.

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I am curious how the situation is evolving, in the discussion about version 4 was said that something new will be released in few days, but after that it was nothing posted for a while and this thread got on the 3rd page.

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really?
we still seem to be on page two

discussion?

with some luck the upcoming version should be ready soon; well, as soon as it's ready rather!