yes the fpscount dramatically increases when turning animation off.
how do i use hardware skinning? would be nice if that works
edit: i decided to post this on the thread, so everybody who may have the same problem might get a chance to solve it by him/herself
thanks, that just didn't work for me.[hardware skinning was meant] but no problem, i found where the performance goes.
my exporter (maya) is able to export shared geometry. your importer doesn't reckognize that [so it seems to me]. if i turn on sharedgeometry within the xmlfile, my app crashes. the funny thing is, your xmlfiles do have shared geometry, but it is turned off. so i think you simply forget to look at that parameter. i now rewrote my sharedgeometry-xmlfile so it matches your ninja (with shared geometry about 700 vertices instead of over 3000).
got now 150 animated characters walking with 50frames/sec (LOD activated, though)