Sorry about my prolonged absence. My older brother unexpectedly passed away a few weeks ago, and needless to say, it's been some pretty rough times. My brother introduced me to pro wrestling when I was younger and over the years it was the one thing that we had a very strong bond over, especially in recent years as (when our schedules permitted) ocassinally attended the ocassional PWG or other local indie show together (in fact, that very weekend that he passed we had been planning to attend the PWG Battle of Los Angeles event).
Anyhow, I will get that guide typed up for you guys shortly. CBV, regarding your question about crowds, stretching can be a bit of an issue, since there's only one movement map per row (and each row is made up of between 3-22 polygons, on 4 different sides), the stretching is applied to all four sides and thus if you were to say, stretch the front crowd horizontally, it would also move the crowd on both sides closer or farther from the barricades. However, the good news is, that through 812 modding, there are a set of addresses within the 812 map of each individual item that affect pallete of whichever texture is loaded, so if you change this value the game will dump a modified duplicate version of whatever texture you had loaded. I'll explain further when I type up the guide, but this can be applied to any polygon that's currently loaded. One important things to note is that the values for these pallete addies are hex number codes, so you can change the value to whatever you want and the game will dump a new texture (thus it's possible to create hundreds of new dumped textures just from whatever individual texture you're editing).
In the case of crowds though, there's a bit of an issue. Because crowds are animated, there is a much higher number of textures that you have to track down, so it's a bit tedious. I have an incomplete crowd map I was working on to see if I could find an easy formula to find these addies, so I'll try to finish it up when I write the guide. I have a feeling that it's going to be hard to explain, so if you guys would like, I will gladly take care of that for you, so long as you guys have completed all the polygon swaps for whichever arenas will get the 2nd (and/or 3rd) set of crowd textures.
Lastly, there is one great potentially practical use for these 812 pallette change addies (so long as people don't mind the dreaded button-activation method of yesteryears): typically, arena texture mods are mostly done in a flat 2D style and only use 1-5 flat polygons, with the ocassional ramp or stage poly as needed; I've found that all these stage polys also have an 812 pallete address, so what this means is that if you take these 1-5 stage polygon addies, find the one for the ringmat, 2 for aprons, 4 for posts, 4 for turnbuckle pads, whatever else you want to change, and you apply them to a button activation code, it's possible to have more than one arena in each slot (the only things you can't change in this method are ropes and any polygon movements or resizing *other than 812 movement). I haven't had time to do further testing on this (I need to test whether it's possible to make arena specific button activation), but so far I only did a really quick test on a 1-polygon arena from the WCW/nWo Starrcade save and I was able to create four new sets of arena textures and got them to change through button activation without any problems.
