Creating New Armor Geometries/Shapes
For use with Starsiege TRIBES

Note:  this procedure is recommended only for experienced 3DMAX users.  Be sure the
downloaded plug-ins have been placed in your 3DMAX/plugins directory before you open
any files.

Start 3DMAX and open the file you would like to modify.  The five base armor
archetypes are included in the files you downloaded.  Note: You cannot change the names
of the armors or the shape names that comprise the armors, i.e., "submesh_lbicep 50".  

Geometry can be altered in two fashions.  One, you can take an existing part of the
geometry, such as the head, and "tweak" the shape, or two, you can delete the existing
part of the geometry and insert a new shape instead.  Please note that if you do this,
this new shape must be linked to the skeletal "bones" in the same fashion and be placed
in the file hierarchy in the same place as the previous shape.

It is recommended that you not get too extreme with changes and try to keep the armor
shapes within the existing bounding box for collision purposes.

Also, all changes must be made to frame 1 (the simplest "base" stance of the armor) of
the armor shape you are working on.  Once finished, frame 3 (the initial "root" stance)
must be copied over frames 0, 1 and 2 so that the first four frames are identical.

For full detail, all changes you make must be made to all three detail levels of the
armor shape.  If you do not want to go into that much detail, change only the highest
detail level.  TRIBES defaults have the highest detail setting for the armors "snapping
in" when the character is closest during game play.  The light armor, for example, will
go to medium detail when it is 36 pixels high, and the lowest at 10.  It disappears
completely when it gets down to two.  If desired, you can change these settings, but it
is not recommended.

Any changes you make to the armor shape are going to have to also be reflected in the 
"skin" for that armor.  Remember that the skin must be laid out on a bitmap and be no
larger than 256x256.  If you make changes to an armor's shape, you will need to use a
paint program such as Photoshop to make changes to the bitmap.  

To view changes made to the armor, you can run the dbshow program.  First, create a
shortcut to dbshow, then right-click on the shortcut icon and select Properties.
Locate the Target field.  At the end of the path description, enter " merge_(name of the
.cs file to view)".  Note that there is a space right before the .cs file name, and you
do not enter the ".cs" suffix to the file name.  

If you wanted to view the changes made to the male light armor, for example, you would
enter " merge_larmor".  

Press Apply, then close the Properties window.  Double-click on the shortcut icon to
open dbshow.

dbshow runs in Glide,  so you can use the Alt-Enter command to go between full screen
and small screen modes.  In full screen mode, you use the W, E, A, S, D, X and C keys
to move the camera.  The I, O, and P keys rotate the figure.  Pressing T in either
window will drop a light into the window.

To properly see the correct palettes for the armor, you need to convert and place the
art for the armor in the dbshow directory.  This bitmap will then need to be placed in
the /dbshow/24bit directory, then run MapArt.bat.  The bitmap will need to be in 24-bit
color, this process will not work otherwise.  Once the batch file has been run, place
the file created called "show2.ppl" into the /dts directory.  You must have the programs
picaNew.exe and mpMerger.exe available (either in the directory you are in, or in a
directory that is in your path) for MapArt to work.  These programs are found in the
TRIBES tools package, available at the TRIBES Players' site.
(http://www.tribesplayers.com/tribesplayers/download/TribesTools.zip)
