Ok, it definitely doesn't work but not for the reasons I thought at first. The good thing is that the camera doesn't seem to pan or rotate so the perspective of the scene does not change. The bad thing is that it's not useable in our case, unless maybe we use orthogonal projections (not tried yet).
Let me try to explain: let's say that the scene is made of a flat, horizontal plane. In the case of a
non-orthogonal projection, objects that are in front of the camera are the least deformed by the camera's perspective. If the character is standing right in front of the camera then they appear to be standing straight up. But as they move away to the right (resp. left) of the camera's axis the objects and characters will be more deformed and they will be leaning right (resp. left).
So by having the default camera overview the left part of the scene, the more the character moves to the right, the more they will lean and be deformed. This might not be too noticeable if the scene is not much wider than the screen but in our case the scene is twice as large. If the default camera was at the centre of the scene then the character would be leaning a little to the left at the extreme left part of the scene and a little to the right on the other side, which is much more acceptable and sometimes a nice effect too.
examples:
cameral set to the left
centered camera
Another problem for us is that it is extremely difficult to design the 3D scene the way you use the 3D camera. We're using 3D pre-rendered backgrounds* and we need the 3DS file to match our scene closely. If the scene is not supposed to scroll then we can use the same camera for the 3DS file and the background, that's good. But if the scene scrolls we cannot use the same camera, as the 3DS camera must overview one part of the scene and the camera used for rendering must see the whole scene. So we need to move the camera and change its field of view but still have it match the scene. I don't think that this is possible except in very simple cases.
So, Mnemonic, would it be possible in future versions to have the 3DS scene to be mapped over the main layer instead of the leftmost screen ? This way the collision and walk mesh as seen from the main camera would be matching the whole scene.
Also, I remember from a previous topic that you said people were moving away from 3D collisions, but I haven't been able to add a 3D character to a scene that doesn't have a 3DS walk file. Am I missing something ?
Filnally, has anyone else encoutered the problem I'm describing here ? If so I'd really like to hear from your experience.
Thanks for reading this far, and now I'm off to test the same scene with an orthogonal projection.
adonf.
* actually we use the pre-rendered backgrounds as a basis for hand-drawn backgrounds but the result is the same