Hi all, I've been making some custom behaviour for garden gnome NPCs and want to give my modified ones a recolour.

Gnome NPCs use the SpellboundMAFat_Gnome mesh which is in the makin magic game files (Expansion7.far).
If I set "bodystring" on my custom gnome iff to
SpellboundMAFat_Gnome,BODY=SpellboundMAFat_Gnome
then it loads perfectly with the default texture, as expected.

I have previously done some digging and seen that in order to use a different texture image I should just need to change the BODY= part of this, however the texture isn't loading when I do this so I'm not sure if I have put the new texture file in the correct place? Or does it need extra cmx files etc?
My recoloured bmap is currently just in the GameData/Skins folder, and it is called SpellboundMAFat_GnomeGreen.bmp

I have bodystring set to
SpellboundMAFat_Gnome,BODY=SpellboundMAFat_GnomeGreen
but in-game it just shows the gnome as a solid white colour, so the correct mesh but no texture

Can anybody point me to what I'm doing wrong? Many thanks

I'm going to answer my own question here as I figured out the problem, in case anyone comes here with the same issue in the future.

I was referencing the alternate skin image correctly but simply had too high a bit depth on the image.
Resaved the texture as a 256 colour bitmap (bit depth of 8) and that was all it needed!
The texture will need some tweaking to not look awful but at least I know why it wasn't working now

hello,for fix this you need write a cmx file of:
_____________________________________
// Character File. Copyright 1997, Maxis Inc.
version 300
0
1
spellboundmafat_gnomegreen
0
0
2
PELVIS
xskin-SpellboundMAFat_Gnome-PELVIS-GNOMEGREENBODY
0
0
HEAD
xskin-SpellboundMAFat_Gnome-HEAD-GNOMEBODY-HEAD
0
0
0
________________________________________

bodystring set to
SpellboundMAFat_GnomeGreen,BODY=SpellboundMAFat_GnomeGreen
and a skn file name is xskin-SpellboundMAFat_Gnome-PELVIS-GNOMEGREENBODY
modify header as:
—————————————————
xskin-SpellboundMAFat_Gnome-PELVIS-GNOMEGREENBODY
SpellboundMAFat_GnomeGreen
—————————————————

because the normal cmx file format is
________________________________________
// Character File. Copyright 1997, Maxis Inc.
version 300
0
1
b000uaskn_proxy
0
0
1
PELVIS
xskin-b000uaskn_proxy-PELVIS-BODY
0
0
0
________________________________________
skn file header is
xskin-b000uaskn_proxy-PELVIS-BODY
x
________________________________________
within bmp files
b000uaskndrk_proxy
b000uasknmed_proxy
b000uasknlgt_proxy
b000uaskn*drk med lgt


but you modified is a NPC skin,so it will need a specified cmx and skn file