ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've an idea starting to form in my head, but it needs the avitar to be a non-human shape by default.

So I tried replacing the body .jpg in an existing .teaa that works, with one I had on hand that's in the same format as tome uses to see what happens.

But all that did was to have the default body outline .jpg appear and nothing else.

So before I go further and use my holl's up, is it possible or are I wasting my time?

thanks

Without knowing what you did or are even attempting to do, I'm not sure what we can do here.

There should be no issue with changing the sprite, and with effort you can sort of move attachment points.

I'm working from Linux (EasyOS to start with for those interested).
the ';' on the end of lines are mine

OK, lets put an example up>

goto https://te4.org/games/addons/tome/nekomata and download the latest ;
save it into a directory with the name of your choice (cat) ;
change the name extension from .teaa to a .zip and upzip it ;
go into ~/cat/overload/data/gfx/shockbolt/player/human_female/ ;
you will find base_nekomata_01.png ;
replace it with another .png of an animal (say the snow_leopard from within tome's sets of characters) using the same 'base_nekomata_01.png' name so you don't have to change it in other places ;
go back to ~/cat/init.lua and change the version and addon_version so you can see that your using yours in the addons menu ;
re-zip the package up and change the name from a .zip to a .teaa ;
goto your game's addon directory and rename the origonal package to *.bak and copy the new one into the addon directory ;
start tome and check the nekomata addon is the updated one and is 'alive' to run ;
start a new game picking cat>nekomata>male ;
it should show a male character ok ;
go back to the main menu and start another game, BUT picking a female charcter ;
and you should only gget an outline of a human figure and not the new .png (at least that's what i get).

And, that's the problem in a nutshell. I've tried it with a number of other addons, characters and sprites with the same results.

And trying with other character .teaa's give the same results.
Any ideas?