OK. I have these characters and I needed to rescale them upward along with my map size. At first using the scale on the loader function didn't work for me because I'm not that familiar with my own code and most of the loading was being done in another class. Not thinking much about it, I used setScale(2) on the object after it was instantiated.
The way I was moving the characters was by translating the object with this code.
SimpleVector d = ob.getZAxis();
if (dMove > .5f) {
d.scalarMul(.5f);
ob.translate(d);
dMove -= .5f;
I computed the distance to the next map point using a trig function, which is dMove in the above code, so it would reach a certain point after so many screen draws. However, after the scaling using setScale(2), the object moved twice as far as the computed distance. When I then figured out why the loader wasn't working, and I loaded the model at a higher scale of 2 with the loader function, the distance traveled worked out right.