Player model changing

Well, I still figure it's something like they're using weird skeletons or assumptions in the data for the mesh. Something about the way that the head and clothing is a separate thing on npcs (I assume it's so they could handle facial animations.. did they literally make a separate head just to animate it independently of the body?)
Thus when you try to just slap it on, it's all twisted and distorted in grotesque ways as the game tries to fit the npc mapping onto a different skeleton and gets confused, or just up and ignores parts of the model that it can't fit on. And then the closer you get, the head doesn't quite work probably since an npc head never ever varies and thus you can assume specific points for your animations etc...
The best question is how it manages to swap out your head for Cyrus' one. Although, part of that might be that his specific head only has the one set of animations when the player is using it.. so unlike actual player heads (which have to map according to all the configurations ever made) npc heads are a given design. Probably related in part to why the earrings etc for the dlc packs don't work, it's because they just turned the npc mesh including earrings into a player one, but forgot that the player head can vary so they can't assume ear placements and in turn they get stretched by head valuesbut still don't mesh due to player head vs npc head sizes.

Just my guess.
 
Most of your post sounds right, except the part about the different skeleton. I'll be the first to admit i don't know anything about animation, but it seems that the "rig" is the skeleton and the "meshes" are the models, and you need them to match up to get it to look right. In this case, applying kinzie's rig actually makes it look worse, though, so either the rig is just not compatible with the player, or i have misunderstood something. Either way, it doesn't look like we'll be able to use anything except Cyrus, which, yes, has player-compatible versions specifically because of one mission.
 
I'm not a 3d modeller so I will use the wrong term, but I pick up things from time to time. The thing is the anchor points used for the animations, whatever the actual term, are probably different between player and npc, likely for the reasons I noted that npcs have a guaranteed mesh and rigging, and moreso they have a guaranteed shape.. while players however can actually have their body and face adjusted (but still using the same animations, thus the same anchoring points with mesh atop transformed according to the slider values)
Quite simply, if players and npcs had the same underlying anchoring and actual design for body, it wouldn't be hard for them to declare any npc your current costume. The fact that they had to make custom costumes for full body replacements, and that they had to copy out the full of Cyrus as a new costume instead of just using the existing body implies it's not easily convertable no matter what is shared between the models.
On the other hand.. the fact that there IS two Cyruses in the files implies that there's probably some heavy similarities.. and it may be possible to compare to figure out what is the player points and moreso how to convert them over, to hexedit any existing NPC model to make it player-usable, without having to figure out how to rip the model apart and change it first.
Besides, the engine must have some way to modify meshes on the fly according to the skeleton it's on, it does it for the players after all (and pics of editing the anchors of the dildo-bat show it properly stretches the model and textures!), so it shouldn't just freak out when fed a model that isn't quite the same size/proportions as the player is. Thus the key is probably just converting the anchor points of your npc to 'player-format', and from there it should work with only slight difficulties. Of course, doing such is the hard part...
 
Good points. One someone's got more of the model format figured out, converting between npc-body and player-clothing versions might be possible. I don't think NPC Cyrus has a separate rig from the one used for the player when masquerading as him. As far as i know there's just the one that is shared between them. Therefore we hopefully wouldn't need to make new rigs, just alter the meshes.
 
Setting the player's team to one of the gangs makes all the gangs friendly to you. That's one reason you'll never see them fight each other -- they're all friendly to each other. You can recruit them, of course. The Morningstar sniper specialist functions normally as followers. The Luchadores brutes and grenadiers just stand there doing nothing, not actually following you. And i know from experience that the Deckers rollerbladers will immediately un-follow you and proceed to attack you.

However, for some reason, i'm unable to make deckers appear in my game, now. I have a 100% complete save, so they don't normally appear anywhere, but even with the gang notoriety cheat at full blast, only Luchadores show up in Deckers territory. -- Correction, the roadblocks are manned by Deckers, but their specialists don't show up, and no more deckers spawn to join the chase.
 
Corrodias said:
However, for some reason, i'm unable to make deckers appear in my game, now. I have a 100% complete save, so they don't normally appear anywhere, but even with the gang notoriety cheat at full blast, only Luchadores show up in Deckers territory. -- Correction, the roadblocks are manned by Deckers.
Click to expand...

That's a vanilla issue with how the notoriety cheat works; or more accurately doesn't.
 
With that in mind, i cleared my notoriety at a Deckers roadblock and attacked only them to raise my Deckers notoriety. It turns out the specialist is happy to be your follower -- even revivable if she goes down! -- but only as long as there are other hostiles (such as Saints) around to fight. If she runs out of targets, she turns on you.
 
I'm very happy to have the Decker specialist homie mod, now.

I thought i'd add a few notes about animations and rigs:

I'm not certain what a rig is, but it has to do with how the parts of the model are applied to animations. You can load a rig onto the player only if it's stored in preload_rigs.vpp, and it seems the game will crash if you try to apply certain rigs like the brute one, although i'm pretty sure that other people successfully applied that rig under certain circumstances. preload_rigs.vpp also contains some .sim files that may or may not have any relation to rigs.

Animations may or may not work on all rigs, that is, it may be that a rig and an animation need to be compatible for the animation to play.

Animation Sets contain the list of animations that play when the character performs certain actions, such as standing or running. Many of the NPC animation sets, such as the rollerblader one, use entirely different action names from what the player sets use. When you do things in the game, the names of the actions match up to the names in the player animation sets. So if you apply another animation set to the player, the player (usually) hardly has any animations. It's performing actions that don't have an animation defined in the set.

The problem with changing the animation sets is that altering the xtbl file doesn't seem to have any effect. Much like the vehicle customization xtbl files, the animation set files seem to have had their data compiled into some other file, and are ignored. They're in misc_tables.vpp, meaning you don't have a str2 file to repack them into. They're supposed to be loose.
 
I was able to get the animation files to actually crash by malforming them and packing them back into their archives rather than just have them in the root. This might just be the key!
 
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