Hopefully the topic title was clear enough - Does anyone know how a random face/hair is assigned to a respawning mob (Eg a Talon Company member), and if so what is the flag that does said thing? Because I'm trying to create a set of templates for a new faction, and I can't see how a random face and hair is assigned...

The re-spawning NPCs are generated from Leveled Lists of pre-defined characters. Its not like you can get a Talon Merc with random features. There are lists with fixed NPC types, one is picked at random from the list. But each entry in the list(s) is identical every time it is selected.

Orly? Thats what I saw in the GECK, but I could've sworn I've seen two different raiders of the same race and gender with different faces/hair... oh well, thanks for clearing that up.

You most certainly have as there are many raiders in the game. For each race there are 3 melee, 3 gun, 3 rifle and 2 special raiders. That's 11 different raiders per race. What you won't see is two raiders with the same race and inventory that have different facial features.

Hmmm, interesting, because I could've sworn that when I checked, the vast majority of AAF faces across the factions looked similar or identical, with the same hairstyle, but I could've been hallucinating. I was experimenting with Jet at the time...

You can always look at the previews in the geck to see how each looks, but than again, as you have hinted at, some of them use a 'template' and would then look identicle to the template version. So yea, there are probably some dupes around. But the general way to have different looking NPCs generated is still the same - you need to pre-make them and add them to lists.

If you pay close attention to every single enemy you ever kill, you will find that about every 30 kills you should see the same face, with the same hair. Its randomly picked, like pkleiss said, from a predetermined list of like 30 faces/races someone sat there and customized. Thats all that its doing.

How uneventful, I thought there might have been some magic going on behind the scenes with a load of premade faces. Oh well, thanks for the info.