I have just added 30 characters models at 1300 poly whit a single bone animation. A little ray casting Object avoidance script as AI.

The framerate drop at 48... i runned it on a GTX 770, I7, 16 gig ram.

So what can we do whit this engine...?

you are probably doing something, wrong in your script.

Mmm not sure...

for exemple if i set shadow_stencil = 1 , my fps drop at 24fps...

If i move away from the characters crown and they are not visible in the screen the fps raise back at 60...

Bone animations are much slower than vertex animations. If u've commercial version or above, its a good idea to use a bone - shader ( theres an example something like "crowd.c" not sure atm ). And maybe u could get some frames with
Or the avoidance script slows things down, who knows. Calling "c_trace * n" per frame ( for example ) isnt really fast. LOD always helps btw. If you wanna make DeadRising 4, Acknex isnt your first choice, of course. ^^

same here. u'll need to use own shaders for those things. See Shade-C, for example.
Scenemanagement.

Greets

stencil shadows are very-very slow with non-very-low poly models, even if there is only one bone anim character in the scene (say over 1000 tris), use shader based shadowmapping (pssm or any other), and it will be fine.
I use 400 characters in my RTS scene, I can get 25-35 FPS in a level with buildings and trees, and a not simple AI, but with bone anim shader which requires a pro license (you can win one for free), but it requires to use LOD models carefully, and other optimizations, like decreasing the number of views. for example I had to remove dynamic depth and refraction views and keep only reflection for my water...

@rayp: I have to add that bone animations are in fact much faster that vertex animations when done on the GPU (=> shaders), otherwise both are slow (and vertex animations need lots of memory).

@OP: yeah, stencil shadows were good 10 years ago because of the rather low amounts of polygons "back then".
For todays games you simply don't want to use these because both, performance and visuals, are really bad.
Before I forget: There are also lots of lighting glitches caused by culling, so I really recommend to use something
else, these shadows are as outdated as this engine.

Performance wise, Acknex is definitely not good in this area. Not saying that it's really bad but it's not lightning-fast
for sure, esp. when it comes to rendering. Lots of entities have a huge memory footprint and are also rendered slow
because of the missing instancing.

As a first step, leave shadows off and try to disable animations to see if that's the problem.

vertex animation is nearly as fast as the bone animation shader. you can see the difference only in case of many characters, but then you get the problem of NOSHADER flag of mirror views...

@sivan: that depends on whether your bottleneck is your CPU or your GPU.

Edit: For vertex animations Acknex might create one vertex buffer per frame, which needs a LOT of memory for detailed animations.

fortunately I don't need complex animations, and I use synchronized animations, which is faster than applying independent entity animations, but cannot be done in every game.
to be honest, I don't really know my bottleneck, but it would be great to determine somehow...