Modding Help Species Modding: How flexible IS customization?

So i'm currently working on a race mod with a huge amount of customization options (it's essentially an intentionally vague Build Your Own Race sort of thing), and i've ran into a snag - from what i've been able to interpret from the myriad of (honestly fairly confusing) options like altOptionAsUndyColor, headOptionAsHairColor and so forth, is that may not be possible to have a both a face detail option (nova brands, avi beaks, apex beards) AND a tertiary color option (human underwear, floran hair details). I've attempted to do some research on the matter but not turned up any way around this. The closest i've been able to get is having the hair color option act simultaneously as the face detail option, but since the options aren't separate it means clicking the arrows changes both at the same time, which is annoying to say the least.

Is it possible to have both the ability to have three colors so that tertiary details aren't stuck with bright red, AND allow facial customization options with the two being separate? If so, how?

Also i've noticed with the genders value in the species file, it is expressed as a list - is it feasible to have more than two body types, or is it just hardcoded to ignore everything past the first two entries of the list?

 

I'm afraid I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'd point out for this one -

I'm not sure, but if you added more genders then there is the question of armor.
Looking at any of them -

Code:

  "maleFrames" : {
    "body" : "chestm.png",
    "backSleeve" : "bsleeve.png",
    "frontSleeve" : "fsleeve.png"
  },

  "femaleFrames" : {
    "body" : "chestf.png",
    "backSleeve" : "bsleevef.png",
    "frontSleeve" : "fsleevef.png"
  },

It could be that they hard coded this (and they probably did). But they also might be looking for "<gender name>Frames" if they wanted to theoretically support more genders. Thus getting the "maleFrames" and "femaleFrames" keys. You'd have to experiment to find out. But even if they support this, actually making it viable is a lot of work since you'd need to patch every armor piece in the game and various mod armor pieces would make it truly unmanageable.

 

Oof yeah, hadn't thought of that. I think in a few cases that are gender-split, it will just default to male, but that's hard to rely on.

It's annoying I keep bumping into the limits of what I can do like this.

 

Gotta think outside of the box.

 

That'd be a lot easier if everything outside the box didn't make the game puke itself to death.

 

Adding extra genders to species doesn't work. I've tried. So that method of adding extra customization is out. I've heard that it might be possible to modify the character select screen so as to group several different races together so as to emulate the functionality of having an extra customization option, though.

 

Yeah I got the idea to look at the config file for the character customization last night and... there's like no callbacks or scripts or anything. It's almost all hard coded, which is just.. bothersome, to say the least. Like you could add new options and sliders but there's no way to actually hook them up to any functionality, so they'd just be useless buttons that do nothing.

Without decompiling the game itself this is a dead end I think, and even if you did decompile it, any mods made via tweaked code would probably be a nightmare to actually distribute.