Still no way to create new textures *without* overwriting old ones?

[Gnomish1987]

I have become very interested in revisiting the possibility of customizing NPC model textures. The process of coming up with a variation on a current texture is not hard in itself (for example, recoloring a green drake to yellow), but the main problem--as some here already know--is that it seems the only way of adding in, say, that yellow drake would be to overwrite an existing texture set.

Texture sets for each model, which are stored in _chr.s3d files, follow a predictable numbering scheme along these lines:

• drkch0001.bmp -- drk = drake model, ch = chest region, 00 = texture set 00, 01 = first piece in texture set 00
• drkch0101.bmp -- drk = drake model, ch = chest region, 00 = texture set 01, 01 = first piece in texture set 01
• drkch0201.bmp -- drk = drake model, ch = chest region, 00 = texture set 01, 01 = first piece in texture set 01
• etc.

It seems like it would be so simple just to create an extra texture set with this info. For example, there are four drake texture sets (00 through 03), and you might think that creating a set of yellow drake textures all titled next in line with the file naming convention (drkch0401.bmp and such) and then dropping these into the appropxiate _chr.s3d file would instantly create a brand new texture set, but once I attempt to call up a drake in this fifth texture, it simply employs texture zero, the black base texture set. Thus, the only way to include that yellow drake would be to replace all the files for either the black drake, the green drake, the red drake, or the blue drake.

I believe the root of the problem lies in the .wld (world) files found within the _chr.s3d files. To the best of my understanding, these hold all the so-called georeferencing data that models rely on, and if the drake in, say, lavastorm_chr.s3d only has four textures (00 through 03), creating a fifth texture set is useless unless there is a way to access the .wld file and, whatever it looks like, attempt to copy + paste the data relating to one of those four working drake models and designate that new copied + pasted wireframe (or whatever it is) to correspond to the new, fifth texture set.

Is there no way of doing something like this? I spent eight hours straight last night combing through countless EQEmu posts and other Google results relating to .wld files, custom textures, all that jazz. I downloaded a number of tools such as Zone Converter and Model Viewer, hoping in vain that something along the way would let me tinker with these elusive files. What a brain drain!

Any helpful feedback would be much appreciated!

P.S.: Apologies if this might have been better posted in another of the forum sections. Here seemed more appropriate than elsewhere.