Making the [furryclan] uniform

The [furryclan] female guest skin

Starting with version 2.11 of the [furryclan] uniform, we include a female guest skin. We started off with the SWT_GT model and mixed and matched a few different textures, taking for example, the face from a female Tango Raider model as well as applying the usual whiter than white wash to the clothes.

Advanced tricks

There's a lot of hacking to do on the .gsm files for this model, as it reuses a lot of textures from other skins. Along the way we stumbled across a few neat tricks.

Filenames

As you already know, you absolutely MUST NOT alter the length of the filenames in the .gsm file when altering texture names. But you probably spotted that the full path stored in the .gsm file comes from the machine on which the model was originally developed (deep in Sierra's secret underground bunker) and most likely doesn't match your system at all.

For example, this path is straight from the SWT_ELEM_HIGH.gsm file:

H:\SWAT3_cqb\FINAL_CHARACTERS\SWT_TEAM\SWT_ELEM_VISOR.bmp

It's the visor bitmap, of course. But do you have a directory named H:\SWAT3_cqb\FINAL_CHARACTERS\SWT_TEAM?? Probably not, but the game still finds SWT_ELEM_VISOR.bmp doesn't it?

Maybe you can already see where this is going...

Now recall that we changed H:\SWAT3_cqb\FINAL_CHARACTERS\SWT_TEAM\SWT_LEGS2.bmp to H:\SWAT3_cqb\FINAL_CHARACTERS\SWT_TEAM\SWT_fcl01.bmp in the [furrycat] model. If the full path is irrelevant but we need to keep its length constant, could we instead have used something like H:\SWAT3_cqb\FIN\furryclan-uniform\furrycat-legs.bmp? What about H:\SWAT3_cqb\FINAL_CHARACTERS\SWT_TEAM\SWT_L\leg.bmp?

The answer is of course, "Yes we could do that." As long as you keep the length of the full path to the texture the same you can add or remove backslashes at your leisure in order to use different length texture file names.

Camos

Inside the .gsm for the female guest are several texture names containing the string CAMO. For example, SWT_CAMO_LEGS. Quite by accident, we discovered that CAMO is a magic tag that is expanded to whatever camo is currently selected, ie SWT_NAVY_LEGS. Of course it can be hexedited out like the rest of 'em...

SWAT_NAME inconsistencies

The .gsm we hacked for the female guest model uses a different sized insignia (SWAT_NAME). We can't fit the [furryclan] logo into the space available. The solution was to cut and paste the logo from the guest legs bitmap into the vest itself. It actually looks better than the "proper" insignia but we can't just replace that because the size of the logo is hardcoded into the .gsm.

On to part six: downloads and quiz.

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