Provided you are not intending to try and change any of the actual bones...all you need to do is extract the skeleton.idx and skeleton.dat ( using the batch file provided in XIDX ). Yo uget a whole load of files which are skeleton files. Copy one of these, rename it, add it to the text file 'list' and you have a copy of the skeleton. It will use identical animations to the original. Next...you extract all the animations ( another batch file for this ). Then...using the chpath command, you can set up a folder with a full set of 'copy' animations. Then you start changing stuff. Once you have all teh changes you want done, re-pack all the skeleton and anim packs and you are good to go. A simple change of the skeleton reference the model usies in descr_model_battle and there you are.

Chack back a way for my thread on animation problems... I put a step by step of the working process in there.

You are not actually making a new skeleton file ( even with the evt files provided by Gerome, making new skeleton files from scratch is impossible. #IT just CTD's ) but you can copy an existing one and change all the anims.

What I REALLY wanted to do, but can't is make a skeleton from scratch with different bone layouts .... but that just can't be done with the tools we have.