Thanks Helghast, I will drop you an email a little later if that's ok?

I've spent a fair amount of time myself working with bones, including rigging up a head to turn and follow players, moving eyes at the correct amount etc. So I am pretty happy that I can write it ,although it sounds like your script might save me some time there, much appreicated.

I am working with 3D Studio max and Biped, so all my bones are named and easily referenced so that shouldn't be to hard to setup.

My questions are really about performance, for example, do you need to run a lot of tracing to get the final rest position or does the bones system support some kind of physics collision? What are the overheads if that is true?

The title I am working on at the moment can have around 30 active agents including up to four players over network / internet, so it would be really good to have an idea how to manage this.

I suspect that ragdoll during death will be client side only, as the final resting position of the model will not be critical, unless they interact with other entities (something I am not planning on at present).

Thanks for sharing, please let me know if you (or anyone else) has any more advice.