Loosing My Head!

[Hyperplexed]

Maybe some of you have seen already my post about the heads... The way they are implemented, I just don't get it, but I'm trying to figure out a solution, and I think I figured out a relatively good one... so let me first explain whats going on:

 

- The head mesh is not being called by the HeadContent Archetype, even though its listed there

- The head mesh is being called by the Pawn Archetype (along with the teeth and eyes I assume)

- The pawn Archetype seems to require at least one skeletal mesh in order for the soldier to be rendered (I replaced the head for the teeth, aside from missing the head mesh and weapon nodes which can be setup, everything else looked fine)

- We cannot add morph targets because UDK seems to destroy vertex order when exporting meshes, so we cant edit the original head morphset

- Changing the head mesh on the Pawn Archetype is not a solution because it will render all existing heads not to show up in the game

 

So after digging a bit I think the only possible solution for adding new head meshes will be to create new genders:

 

- Instead of presenting the Male/Female only options, we could have Male 01, Male 02, Female 01, Female 02, and/or even aliens. I tested and even replacing just the pawn archetype, MOST anims work pretty well. I replaced the Soldier_M for mutons, and aside from some specific anims on the head that could most likely be tweaked, it worked pretty good.

 

 

My guess is that it all starts with editing XGTacticalGameCoreNativeBase and adding new genders, this part is easy ofc:

// jboswell: these are here because they need to be native
enum EGender
{
	eGender_None,
	eGender_Male,
	eGender_Female
};

My problem is that I'm not a programmer (my education and work revolves around design) and even though I've scripted other games like Skyrim extensively, for me to get used to how a certain language works, takes a lot of time, so I'm unsure what to do/where to go next. I imagine that I should also go and edit UICustomize_Info next, to see if the new genders will be displayed:

simulated function CustomizeGender()
{
	CustomizeManager.UpdateCamera();
	Movie.Pres.UICustomize_Trait(m_strGender, "", CustomizeManager.GetCategoryList(eUICustomizeCat_Gender),
		ChangeGender, ChangeGender, CanCycleTo, CustomizeManager.GetCategoryIndex(eUICustomizeCat_Gender));
}
simulated function ChangeGender(UIList _list, int itemIndex)
{
	CustomizeManager.OnCategoryValueChange( eUICustomizeCat_Gender, 0, itemIndex );
	UIMouseGuard_RotatePawn(`SCREENSTACK.GetFirstInstanceOf(class'UIMouseGuard_RotatePawn')).SetActorPawn(CustomizeManager.ActorPawn);
}

Why is the function ChangeGender being called twice? Initially I thought it could be related to the fact that there are 2 genders you can pick from, but the function for the Country does exactly the same, and there are a bunch of them so that can't be it. Anyway, I'm lost, and any help would be appreciated. And in case anyone more code savy wants to develop this idea (like a framework for adding more genders), go ahead and knock yourself out!

 

Thanks in advance!