Help with b3d animation internals

I am still working on improving my blitz3d+ dll and ran across the following info, can anyone tell me what VMap0-3 and weight0-3 represent....I assume VMap indexes a bone and weight is the weighting for the corresponding bone ?

vertice

+0 X float
+4 Y float
+8 Z float
+12 NX float
+16 NY float
+20 NZ float
+24 Blue byte
+25 Green byte
+26 Red byte
+27 Alpha byte alpha/255
+28 U0 float u coordset 0
+32 V0 float V coordset 0
+36 U1 float u coordset 1
+40 V1 float v coordset 1
+44 VMap0 byte
+45 VMap1 byte
+46 VMap2 byte
+47 VMap3 byte
+48 Weight0 float
+52 Weight1 float
+56 Weight2 float
+60 Weight3 float

Sounds about right. Does that mean you can only have 255 bones per entity?

So it would appear, I loaded an animated b3 created in milkshape and the VMap0 values seemed to index bones 1-7 and weights were all 1.0, now if I could only figure out the offsets to the animation keys etc. this could be really useful.... procedurally create animations & save the model directly from memory etc.

If anybody out there knows how to access this data directly from the entity structure and would like to share I would appreciate it, will gladly add the functions to my blitz3d+ dll and share with the community

Surface:


Vertex:


Other:
http://blitz.pp.ru/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203

Thanks MikhailV, this is great stuff, very useful