My using the NHR system was to fix the colour thing so protos have only their colours, but where the NHR does it's change seems to be too late and it defaults to weird values. I've spent over a week hunting around the code to see where to hook in for changes. I tried the CharacterInfo constructor and it changed them all the protos but they used human colours so it's too late. I worked on my own mod for a bit for an easy win but plan to come back to to this. The NHR system is nice but the mod author doesn't update often and it's a bit messy. But it's the only option atm.

I did try to see if I could just hook into the colour picking system and reverse/change the values based on what the species tag is, but had trouble reading that tag. The code is completely hardcoded to read a single readonly array.

yeah I did notice that aswell, the only way to edit it is to completely ovverride the games customisation code which out make it a total pain in the ass to update for every version

I would like to add a special NPCs file and add notable protos like purple, raeal, etc.

that sounds cool I might also open like requests or ♥♥♥♥ for characters

if anything just make a patch rather then risk breaking the entire mod
not that i would know how to do that but just an idea

ok so you know how robotrauma has robot diffrent from males and females?
what if we set protogens as diffrent from males and females and make special skin color variables just for them?
and do the same with neon color
listen i might be cooking

sadly skin tone isnt sorted by gender, so even if I were to add a whole new gender, there would be a seperate tab specifically for protogens, except that wouldn't solve the issue of humans having odd skin tones.

no no like
make the current skin tone not affect protogens in any way
and make a second color wheel for protogen fur only available for protogen gender
like how femle gender hides the beard, make the protogen gender hide the normal skin color, and make the other genders hide the protogen fur color
you get what im sayin?

that could work but then I also run into the issue of facial hair colors, meaning with the current color options for both face and fur colors I would need to make 324 variants lmao

I'll figure out something eventually when I come back to barotrauma

that would also mean that protogens would spawn significantly more often