I know it’s early and the more I dig and find the more I am impressed and happy.
However modular pawns, anyone have some documentation?
Similar treatment as UDK:
- Separate meshes.
- Same skeleton.
- One mesh (parent) drives animation for all others (children).
I’ll see about dumping some code in the wiki about it.
Edit: Wiki Entry: Modular Pawn
Thanks for all your contributions to the wiki Kris 
So your method is different from the UE3 licensee “composite meshes” way, right? Because your meshes are actually separate?
yeah having separate meshes was the ‘free’ way of having modular pawns in UDK. That’s the way i did it for my thesis. I had a prototype 2 style character that transformed. The body was the parent mesh (because it never changed) and the arms were child meshes.
Kris where is the Karma system to give you some credit, Awesome Sauce mate!
But I would assume that this method would be more inefficient than the composite way, no? Because it has to render more meshes, etc etc. It also seems more unwieldy (to me) having to manage a bunch of different meshes; for instance, toggling visibility and such.
In other words, now that we have the source code, which method do you think is better? Or is it just a matter of preference?
I didn’t have a license for UDK so I couldn’t find out anything about the composite method. It probably is more efficient, that’s maybe why you only got it with a license?
I think it came with a license just because it needed such deep code modification, there wasn’t any unrealscript function to support it.
The reason I would like to do it that way now is because it seems easier to handle once you have it set up. I had a weapon customization system in UE3, and every time I changed any property of the weapon mesh I had to change the same property on all of the weapon’s attachment meshes (sights, grips, etc.). If I could just compile them all into one mesh right from the start, it would be easier, or so I think. I will have to try it.
You could always setup a base class or Blueprint to update attachments/child meshes for you.
This is what we have done in Ground Branch.
Weapon, clothing, pouches etc - all based off GBInventory.
True, I guess I should set it up to be more automated. And I suppose the performance impact from having multiple meshes is probably minimal.
Your performance impact leads me to another questions I will have to start another thread on I guess.
I don’t actually know if there is a performance impact or not, I was unable to try the composition method since I was not a licensee 
I would assume that there is a very small performance impact because it has to do more draw calls and whatnot. You’d probably only have to worry about it on mobile, but I could be wrong.
As far as I am aware, this is less of an issue with a deferred renderer.