Change Player Character Skeleton Type?

[Khajiit Tail]

I'm messing around with AAF, and wanted to see if I can get it to work with Playable Deathclaw, since I'm quite fond of how surprisingly sweet some of the deahtclaw animations are. I did manage to patch the Playable Deathclaw mod so that the right anatomy is attained. I also tried making a file called Theme_Animations_raceData_PlayableDeathclaw.xml in which I had set defaults source="Playable Deathclaw.esp", and a bunch of entrie assuring that the deathclaw races all got registered with the deathclaw skeleton. Then I throw in an overriding version of Theme_SexVanilla_themeData.xml where I include instruction to use the new Theme_Animations_raceData_PlayableDeathclaw.xml file. This was all done the same way in which I had previously had success patching in Goris, a modded deathclaw follower based on a character from Fallout 2, except this time it did not work.

 

Is there some magic trick I can pull to make the player character register as anything other than a human? Or is that somehow a hard-coded part of the AAF mod that the player will always be recognized as human? Is there no reason why what I describe shouldn't work, and I've probably just screwed it up? Is there a problem with referencing a .esp file with regular spaces in the name (instead of "_" underscores) in the Theme_Animations_raceData xml file? Have my learning-disabled ass missed reading some very, very obvious instruction somewhere that everyone is expected to have seen that would solve this issue? I look forward to finding out what flavor of dumbass I am.

Edited May 17, 2024 by Khajiit Tail

[EgoBallistic]

Making that work will be pretty complicated because of the way AAF handles the player.  To avoid certain problems with the game engine, AAF doesn't actually animate the player; instead it creates a body double and animates that.  When you change into a deathclaw, that doesn't affect the body double, so when AAF starts an animation it still uses a human body.  So there would need to be a fair bit of scripting behind the scenes to get everything synchronized.