Just came up with a way to do this - Shadow Sovereign has been using this approach to make new objects but didn’t have a way to save the combination. There is a catch (of course ) - it won’t work with the shapes supplied in the Alice gallery. Instead you - or someone - has to first generate the basic shapes in another program that will put them into a hierarchical .ase file (I used 4DBlue for the attached) and then import that file into Alice.

However, once that new object file (such as TestWoman - note the sphere and cone were combined as one sub-object in 4DBlue) is in Alice you can duplicate the shapes, move them, resize, color or texture them, etc. (be sure to check "affect subparts") and then save the result as a new .a2c file. All of the changes will be saved with the new object (TestWoman2 as an example). (An exception is that any changes made while a world is running - resize in only one direction, for example - won't be saved.)

I like 4DBlue for this (even though using it takes a bit of time to figure out - it‘s not hard, just not well documented) because (1) it has good basic shapes, (2) the shapes are easy to resize once you figure out how, (3) it’s default is to assign one texturable surface per sub-object and (4) it exports directly to .ase format which, at least so far, avoids the problems with normals that I’ve had with some other programs and Biturn. Note all the surfaces in these objects are one sided but supposedly you can make two sided surfaces and also cap the cylinder.

Let me know what you think, look at the simple shapes I've already converted to Alice format (in the attached zip folder) and let me know what other basic shapes you might like.

Also see later post for folder with these shapes in .ase format and Shadow Sovereign's post for how to get those into an object hierarchy.