Yes, you're right! I've had problems dealing with animated b3d shadows and ashadows lib, but to be honest, I hope that, so it continues being an excellent library or addon to achieve post process effects that blitz is not capable to do (or at least, it's much slower).
Regarding to your decision about .X and b3d, when I tested the anim b3d shadows and it didn't work, I decided to use swifft shadows system to do that and it works prefectly.
To change to another format just to obtain a good stencil shadows was not a good decision for me, much to loss and a little to win... so I use swift shadows (it is slow depending on the number of polygons of each model and the complexity of your scene) but I decided to get the way of optimizations (when the entitites are so far I quit its shadow, in mid-distance I put the typical transparent circle and only when the characters or models are really close to the camera, I use the swifft's shadows.
The game works very well in this way. I'm managing a great landscape, in size as well as polygons (+30000), +20 animated b3d characters of aprox. 1000-1500 polys, shadows (swwift), post process effects (ashadows), Gui (Ultrafast Image lib by MixailV), Particle Candy and some other thing I'm forgeting.
So I would maintain your b3d models and try to do some optimizations regarding shadows and similar stuff. Dealing with .X is not as easy as doing it with .B3D in a lot of ways. That's my view.
I hope to be helpful! ;)
Regards!
Regarding to your decision about .X and b3d, when I tested the anim b3d shadows and it didn't work, I decided to use swifft shadows system to do that and it works prefectly.
To change to another format just to obtain a good stencil shadows was not a good decision for me, much to loss and a little to win... so I use swift shadows (it is slow depending on the number of polygons of each model and the complexity of your scene) but I decided to get the way of optimizations (when the entitites are so far I quit its shadow, in mid-distance I put the typical transparent circle and only when the characters or models are really close to the camera, I use the swifft's shadows.
The game works very well in this way. I'm managing a great landscape, in size as well as polygons (+30000), +20 animated b3d characters of aprox. 1000-1500 polys, shadows (swwift), post process effects (ashadows), Gui (Ultrafast Image lib by MixailV), Particle Candy and some other thing I'm forgeting.
So I would maintain your b3d models and try to do some optimizations regarding shadows and similar stuff. Dealing with .X is not as easy as doing it with .B3D in a lot of ways. That's my view.
I hope to be helpful! ;)
Regards!