How do I customise multiplayer characters

so I've been dissasembling the multiplayer example and started adding some changes.

I've made a color selection in the login screen

and with that

now i understand that the peer doesn't yet exist so the set shoulderpads for peer is useless.

however i have trouble assigning this to the player later on.

in the example, they use a login as and use the name which is the only global variable.

with certain attempts i got everyone to have the chosen color(these are half circles next to the character)

and each of them is invisible by default.

I've tried both

and

and neither worked to give me different values.

so I'm having large problem with setting the values.

notably I forgot to add this line in to my post

which sets the user peer.shoulderpad value to the global variable but that only works for the host from his own screen...