New type of Dynamic Accessory for Glamour Options (Glasses, Trinkets, Badges, Etc)
When reading about people wanting to wear glasses and a hat at the same time I was thinking about a system that would allow players to customize their character further without SE having to send or store any more information than normal.
I think this system would prevent duplication and allow for some new types of visuals for our characters~
Core idea:
First some items, like glasses, would gain tags and these tags would be a key part in the system.
Second these specially tagged items would be glamour-able onto your accessories that already have model information (stuff the servers has to share with you automatically).
For example:
Elegant Rimless Glasses, they're a head-slot item (obviously). They're now also tagged accessory, and either a unique "glasses" tag or unique "head slot" tag (optionally both, I'll go into more detail).
Accessory tag is non-unique and doesn't go into conflict detection, what it does mean is you can glamour this item onto your accessory slots on top of wherever the item normally comes from (for example glasses normally glamour onto head ware).
Other tags like head slot, glasses, open-gloves, etc could be used as white list, black list, conflict management tools (read below for further details).
Conflict Resolution/Examples:
Now you've got a hat you really want to wear with your glasses so:
- Head gear: Summer Straw Hat
- Necklace: Elegant Rimless Glasses
They're both on your face now. Wearing a hat with glasses.
A question would be, what about when you have multiple glasses or other conflicting glamour applied - it better not just stack a bunch of glasses on your face~!?
So:
- Head-slot: Summer Straw Hat
- Necklace: Red - Elegant Rimless Glasses
- Ring: Blue - Elegant Rimless Glasses
- Ring: Green - Elegant Rimless Glasses
- Earring: Purple - Elegant Rimless Glasses
- Bracelet: Pink - Elegant Rimless Glasses
WHAT WILL HAPPEN!?
The system will put on your hat and the red glasses, then it'll go to the next item and be like "we've already got the glasses tag" and ignore it (reverting the visual of the item to it's default), again and again.
So you'll end up with Summer Straw Hat and Red Elegant Rimless Glasses, the rest of the items will default out into their normal appearance.
Picture how when you wear gear that can be worn by all classes but the glamour on it is "Dragoon only", except you're a Ninja.. So the gear just defaults to it's original as it can't be visually worn by you. A similar system to that would be applied here.
Simply put the tags will act as checks and balances, you can't wear two glasses at once, oh you can't wear this cloak because your current chest piece comes with one already.
The question about why I said head slot or both is in that, lets say SE doesn't want you to be able to wear glasses when wearing a heavy full plate helmet. Well they could tag the helmet with head slot, so when the system checks glasses it will be like "no, no glasses". They could design the system the other way of course such that glasses tags have to be paired with "open" (like open view, such as a summer straw hat).
In this way you have a system that prevents you from duplicating visuals and also gives SE control to prevent certain combinations as they see necessary. It's important to be consistent though so it's easy to understand, so if they go black list or white list route (or both) it needs to be clear, concise, and consistent.
Because we know they have conflict resolutions systems for your job (as it checks your job against your glamour) I assume they could do so with these tags as well; however, if we needed to make it more resource friendly (less questions on the client side) these tags could be built into the glamour plates and perhaps make it so you can attach them to the armory (so they're checked by the server at upload). If using the plate system though it's important to add more plates, because people already flip tables for more plates lol.
New items and visual combinations:
This system also opens up a new type of item that fills no slot. For example SE could award players a badge from doing a particular quest, the badge cannot be equipped in any standard way you'd expect. But the badge does have accessory tag and badge tag. So now you could glamour the item onto your accessory slots.
Some examples of new items we could have, without requiring new slots for the game to send/receive:
- Badges
- Trophies (like witcher 3)
- Cloaks (inb4 "no capes" jpg)
- Glasses
- Cap feathers (add a feather to your hat/helmet)
- Extra belts (Make Tetsuya Nomura proud!)
- Nails (combine "open glove" tagged armor with nails on your accessory and have both, like black mage gloves often show fingers).
- Tabards (like WoW)
- Tankards, scabbards, side arms, and bags
- Backpack
- May consider light body modification in this too, like tattoos
Like you could be wearing a hat with glasses, long nails with your open black mage gloves, have a backpack, and a few drinking glasses dangling from your belt.
Now depending how they use tags, either via white list, black list, or some sort of unique identifiers this system could require SE to tag every item in the game... Which is.. frankly a big task. Thankfully tagging stuff is relatively simple and so they could probably hire some interns to do it (it's basically data entry)... It'll still take a while though lol. But this all depends on how they go about it, technically they don't have to do that (depending on how they go about restrictions).
Personally I believe if they were going to go over all the items it would be a great time to also implement a glamour system like WoW has (other games have this too), where nearly every single item in the game is stored on an account wide catalog (as you collect them). This way as they go through all the items and apply them to the glamour system that they only do it once. Again though as I said they don't have to go through all the items, it just depends on how they build the tag list and how exclusions are made.
Tl;dr, by using a tag system SE could allow us to glamour over our accessory slots (which are almost always invisible, or even when visible.. basically still invisible lol) and hopefully by using pre-existing information sent by the game and by using their conflict detection system (like what they use for jobs) that we will have new ways to customize our character without causing loads of new stress on the game.
