UE1 - UT Simple task made painfully difficult

[Rajada]

I keep reading all these skinning tutorials for Unreal and basically you can drag and drop a skin and select it in the menu for your player. Here's the problem. I have a game called Nerf Arena Blast. It uses the same engine and I wanted to try to skin a model for it. I finished the skin and it looks good, BUT in this particular game, each selectable player is it's own entity, in other words of the 32 players each could be viewed as it's own race. In the select player menu, a drop down list has every character in it.

But I still gave it a shot. I made a new class below Pawn.PlayerPawn.NerfKids.Male (the class containing all male players) and applied the new skin. THAT worked, but inside of my new PlayerPawn is this code...

function PreBeginPlay()
{
    Super.PreBeginPlay();
    PlayerReplicationInfo.TeamType=TEAM_Twisters;
    PlayerReplicationInfo.BotIndex=AKA_Ted;
}

function Texture Face()
{
	return Texture'NerfKids.SkinIcons.I_Ted';
}

I can change the "SkinIcon" easily, but there is a problem. My new guy is not named TED, let's call my new guy BOB for ease. If I change the BotIndex code to AKA_Bob;, I get the error:

Bad or missing expression in '='

Obviously all the AKA's are stored somewhere and mine doesn't match any of them. That is the first problem I have yet to resolve

Second, it would seem the same issue applies to SELECTING my charcter. It seems the players you can select are hard coded in the Menu or somewhere else. That is the second problem I have yet to resolve.

So my question is, does ANYONE have ANY suggestions, work-arounds or anything they can offer me? Is there a simple way to force a new player into the selection menu via a mod?

I understand if you are confused as this game is a bit different than Unreal. I do have the code at my disposal so do feel free to ask for clarification if you think you can help at all.

Thanks.

 

[Rajada]

I found the bot index and successfully got a new character to appear, but the method is very messy and would require some careful editing of core files. Might take a stab at it, might not.