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You've just finished your skins and now
you have only one step remaining! You have to turn that lovely piece of
art into a VOL file for Tribes. It's actualy quite easy once you understand
it. You must first have Pal3 and you can download that right there, and
you must have the Bat files to create your skins and you can download
those right there. Now once you have these you wan't to create a new folder
on your desktop (because it just makes things easier this way) and call
it...well whatever you want, as long as you know it's your skins making
folder. Put the bat files and the Pal3 in there. Now you'll need to go
back into Photoshop. Now go to Image, Image size, and make sure that your
Pixel Dimensions are set to 256 x 256. If not your skin will go all wacky
and your tribes will close and you don't want that to happen. =) Now go
to Image, Mode, then Indexed Color. It will ask to flatten layers so just
go ahead and say yes but make sure that you saved it before you proceed.
It will then bring up a small box and in there is the Palette options
so click the down arrow there and select Custom. In Custom select the
Load button then find your folder with Pal3 in it. Select that then hit
OK, then OK again and your image should look a little grainy but thats
ok it will turn out fine when you wrap them. Now go to File, Save a Copy,
then make sure the save file is a BMP format. Name your file and save
it to your skin making folder. Another window will pop open. On there
just make sure it has 8-bit marked then hit OK. You can close Photoshop
if your done with it or just minimize it for now if not. Open your skinmaking
folder and find the MakeSkin bat file. Right click it and select Edit.
If it asks what to edit with choose notepad. Now it should look like this.

Yourskin is where you will
place the name of the skin you have made. Make sure to keep it the same
with the other one also. Yourskin.larmor.bmp will vary in what skin you're
making. If you are making a male light armor then the middle should say
"larmor". The others are as follows:
Female Light - lfemale
Male Light - larmor
Female Medium - mfemale
Male Medium - marmor
Heavy - harmor
So depending on what you're
wrapping is what the middle will be. If your wrapping more than one armor
at the same time to make a complete set (I guess that would be smart =)
then place a line for each one like this.

See how they are each a different
armor? Now when you are done editing MakeSkin.bat save it then edit WrapSkin.bat.
You will see a window that looks almost like MakeSkin. It looks like this.

Now the text at the end is
the same as the one from MakeSkin.bat. In the front, the yourskin.vol,
is the key part. If you are making an armor and using more than one skin
file, the .vol MUST be the SAME on each line. If not you will get different
files with one skin on them. The .vol can be called a different name from
your .bmp file. Like this:

Again once you are done just save and
close it. Now all you need to do is run your batch files, make sure that
you run them in order, and sit back at watch the magic! Watch how it makes
each file like you told it to do. Guess what? You just did some programing!
Simple as that folks! Congrats you just made your first skins! Now take
that .VOL file and toss it into you Tribes/Base/Skins folder
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