This is starting to get interesting, nad hopefully will bear some fruit! Now, I am no expert when it comes to hex reading, but I do know a reasonable amount about actually trying to use the old tools..... and they were clearly not extracting data in a reliable fashion. Casuir's explanation would certainly go some way to explaining it.

From what I recall, the process that we were missing before was centred around the skeleton.dat.

We could edit this through a batch file which seemed to be able to change certain human readable parts of the DAT file to change animations. We were not...in actual fact...changing things properly. There was a clear problem actually creating a new skeleton with revised bone positions. We could scale and rename, but no more than that. I asked a lot of questions on this front, but never actually got a clear answer. The CAS file had a skeleton in it, but this was just a reference point for animation. The DAT file had the starting positions in it, but we couldn't re-write them. Never worked out why! I don't hink Vercingetorix ever did either!

The other issue I ran across so many times was the limit to the extreme rotation of parts without corrupting the file. If, as I was lead to believe, the animation files were a series of rotations applied ot the root positions held in the DAT file, there should not be a problem with the amount of rotation. In Metal Mayhem, I bent things REALLY out of shape...so I know how easy it was to break things! Casuir's assertion that we were not playing with real CAS files was again a point worth considering. We have no way of knowing for sure, since the whole pipeline was geared to getting something out of the IDX file that Max could read in to re-position the skeleton he had built up in his max importer. Working from a clean sheet of paper ( as we are for this project ) give us the chance to put aside what went before, and to think it through from first principles.

We need to understand the Skeleton.dat file first, since it holds the key to the starting points. When we can re-locate these points and build a base skeleton, we can then look to work out how the IDX files are changing the thing around. Personally, I prefer them packed...even if we could run with them out of a pack... since it is just a lot neater!

I just wish I could actually understand a bit more of the technical stuff, but I was not designed to think in hexadecimal!