Hidde Glamours Locally (& other graphically immersive options)

[Bearded]

:et's think about this rationally for a moment....

You can only access the glamor plates in certain areas due to legacy code restrictions (I think that's the reason anyway).

In order to automagically display the true nature of the item to some or the glamoured version to others some new code is going to have to perform a check for each character in visible range and on the fly display one or another version of their gear.

Any idea how many hours of dev time that is going to take away from actual development? I doubt it's even actually possible simply due to the spaghetti legacy code.

[Krotoan]

:et's think about this rationally for a moment....

You can only access the glamor plates in certain areas due to legacy code restrictions (I think that's the reason anyway).

Glamour plates are basically references to model/texture/color flags. As far as the game is concerned this is additional storage and needs to be isolated from other possible referrals/changes to inventory so as not to increase possible bandwidth between the character server and the game server (as far as I can figure out).

In order to automagically display the true nature of the item to some or the glamoured version to others some new code is going to have to perform a check for each character in visible range and on the fly display one or another version of their gear.

The game is already querying every person in range and getting flags from the server as to what to show them wearing. It really would be no different from what we have now. In addition if you have a toggle that normalizes PCs in range it would be allowed to IGNORE all that information and provide pre-set glamours instead, reducing data throughput from server to client. Which is exceedingly minor for appearance anyway as every model/texture/dye combination is just flags your client reads to know what to display reinforced by what we know of how mods work. They replace the client files for whatever model/texture flag so when you get sent the flags for say platemail, it just displays the modded files on your computer.

Any idea how many hours of dev time that is going to take away from actual development? I doubt it's even actually possible simply due to the spaghetti legacy code.

Since players can already basically do this themselves with graphical mods, it's not as complicated as you say unless we go the checklist of every single item route.
I'm not saying it would take no time, but if I go with how next to every non-file-consistency-enforced game mod works that I know of, it would be a matter of being able to toggle your client to either check what someone is actually wearing.. or simply ignoring all that information and providing an appropriate generic appearance according to class/race/gender.

No increased data throughput and purely client side.