I have some stellar news on the .mds front, so hopefully all the mods will finally be able to get custom player models into their game. 
First, let me start by saying where i was at the last posting. I had successfully exported a few models, but the big thing was that the object names were getting messed up somewhere along the line. For example, one of my characters was exporting with l_legs as u_body, u_venom as u_demo and vice versa for both. Although that didn’t affect the way the model was displayed as long as i adjusted the .skin files properly, it was still grating on my nerves solely bc i’m an anal twit. There was also a case where u_handrt, u_handlft, u_body, and u_legs were collapsing to u_body, thus i had to combine all the textures on a big page and mess with the uv’s which was annoying to say the least. So, that’s the backstory.
Somewhere along the lines between that and now i discovered that when i changed the material id’s of the objects, they would export as separate objects (that’s how i was able to get the l_legs, u_body, u_demo and u_venom problem :)). Another problem that arose from that was that even though i could confidently export the objects separately, i had no clue what material id was supposed to be assigned to what. It ends up that as far as i can tell, it doesn’t matter. If you want multiple objects exported, they merely need to have separate material id’s. So, assign matID of 1 to l_legs, 2 to u_body, 3 to any accesories you have (u_handrt, u_demo), 4 to any accesories you have, etc. export and you’ll be set.
Now comes the part that i only found out yesterday. .skl files are in fact large text files. As the fakk tools’ docs say, “Being text-based allows .SKL files to be viewed or edited in a text editor, making diagnosing problems in models more convenient.” My God, that was a chorus of angels to my ears. 
So, i quickly opened up my .skl files with wordpad and crashed wordpad. :lol: So, i dled ultra edit and opened it and it worked much much better. 25 meg files just weren’t meant for wordpad… Anyway, one of the first things in the .skl file is a list of the materials. upon seeing it, i saw that all of my materials were there (for the one that indeed did export fine save the name flopping). The material id’s for each object are one higher than in the .skl, so for example, i had mat id’s of 1, 5, 7, and 9 (don’t ask why, i just like random odd numbers) and they show up as 0, 4, 6, and 8. All you have to do is renumber your materials in the .skl to max that of what you had in 3ds. So, from a real example…
Original output from max…
NUMMATERIALS 4
MATERIAL 0 u_body
MATERIAL 4 l_legs
MATERIAL 8 u_venom
MATERIAL 6 u_demo
Updated .skl file that exports into .mds perfectly
NUMMATERIALS 4
MATERIAL 0 l_legs //mat id of 1 in 3ds
MATERIAL 4 u_body //mat id of 5 in 3ds
MATERIAL 6 u_venom //mat id of 7 in 3ds
MATERIAL 8 u_demo //mat id of 9 in 3ds
If for some reason the export went incorrectly and you have NUMMATERIALS 1 and only 1 object listed below, just add in the materials names (they are listed in the bones below with how it exported in case there is any discrepancy) and change the NUMMATERIALS to reflect it.
So there you go, i finally feel complete with .mds and .skl. I only wish i’d known the .skl file was a text file earlier. Lousy punks making uncompressed formats so it’s easy for us and we blow it by not paying attention to that. :rolleyes:
After all this, i feel it’s only good to leave you with a quote from a wise man… After exclaiming how happy i was to learn all this, djbob replied with, “shame you’ll have to learn our new format ;)” :twak:
Hope this helps everyone who was having any problems. As always, questions are always welcome.
