I've spent the last few days trying to beat Visual3d into submission, and so far I have a "lizardman" representing the main character, an infinite plane, a box, and a car. The controls are working pretty much the same as in Abandon (I think...). Pretty sweet, I know.

Here is what I have discovered so far:

Documentation
The tutorials and documentation for Visual3d are frustrating and incomplete. There are two situations when trying to use it:

1. A tutorial exists, but it is too old to be useful. Apparently Visual3d just released a new beta making all of their old stuff not very useful. Also, most tutorials that exist are focused around using the GUI rather than the coding behind it.

2. A tutorial will be coming "soon". Usually, these say things like "Coming in September 2008!" or something like that.

Community
The Visual3d community is very good however. I posted a question about terrain and had it answered quickly and well. The person who answered is very involved in Visual3d, so there are some good experts who are willing to help you with even beginner problems.

Some of the help is useless. Someone will ask "is it possible to do this?" and will get the answer "yes" by someone without any instructions or hints or anything. Usually someone else will come by though and give real help.

Good Idea
The best method I've found so far of figuring out what is going on is to look at the provided Tech Demos and see how they coded their scenes. This is the way I figured out how to do most of the things in my code.

What I need to do now:
- Make it so my main character can't run through the box.
- Make it so the character actually turns in the direction of travel rather than strafing.