Okay, so I've decided hats aren't a good first clothing item. I mean, in order to expedite the restoration of moral fiber to our decaying society, I'm going to add pants first. I guess dresses would satisfy that need even more, for the female characters, clearly, but pants are easier, and they cover the major points (multiple body parts, covering half of a body part) without introducing frills (loose connectors in dresses, points and rims in hats).
So, to get myself hyped up, here's the standard technobabble: as I said before, clothing will be stored as simple creature representations. In this case, the creature form contains Body and Leg nodes. The Leg node is attached to the outer (as opposed to central) position on the body. To create a pants item definition, I'll say that pants are any simple creature rep'n that covers the outer portion of the body and all of the outer legs. As things stand then, hexapods (eg ants) wouldn't have pants, because they have central legs only. However, a quadruped like a dog could still have regular doggy pants because the hind legs are the outer ones. The front legs are central. Furthermore, if you make a novel form with, say, four outer legs all coming out of the body, then the game will be able to adjust when it makes pants for those creatures. I haven't quite pieced together how the game will handle a human trying to put on such pants, and how the extra legs will hang and so on, but this is the general idea. Most other clothing items can be handled like this. There are more subtle differences... such as adjunct parts and how they are handled. For instance, with gloves, each adjunct (finger) is given its own component, while boots don't conform to this model unless you want them to look cute. Hats and masks cover different portions of the same part. And I'm sure there are more problems... hanging and tight fitting jewelry for example. Statues are also going to be stored using creature rep'ns... pants are essentially hollow lower-halves of statues made from non-rigid materials from the game's point of view. This makes animation spells almost easy, for both statues and things like empty suits of armor.
As usual, things are complicated, but the upside should be that given any creature at all, Armok should be able to given them appropriate little outfits in time for the next release.
Hmmm... if you have arms that you walk with on your lower body instead of legs, I wonder if the shirts you wear down there should be called shirts or pants, or if it is somehow decent to wear nothing in that case.
Anyway, pants sometime soon. Shirts and gloves would follow almost immediately.
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Topic: Etc. (Read 13310 times)