What I described would not work for a cape. A cape plate armor robes and other objects the change or silhouette require a model to be made and placed over your character. However something like a guild emblem on your cape, in addition to other things, would work quite nicely with the alpha blending system that I propose.
There are pitfalls when placing a model over character. As the character flexes and moves the garment has to move as well. In a few games you can see an occasional time when a polygon pops out of a garment. It also increases the polygon count. One way to solve some of these problems is to have a different model for silhouette changing clothing. This is not ideal because it means that there?s a lot of modeling to be done. Just having a cape added to a model means that all player characters that need to have a cape have to be remodeled with the cape. There are times when this is a good idea but not often. Add the silhouette changing helmet and it multiplies the problem. Anyway you put it, silhouette changing close are not trivial to implement. I would expect it way later.
Another thing that was brought up in a previous thread was the fact that a lot of people like to customize clothing weapons and other things that are on their character have. The problem with this is that when you get an update it the deletes out the file attached to the emblem. It wouldn?t be too hard to write a simple macro to put them back after an update. It also wouldn?t be too difficult to get the developers of the game not to write over guild emblems. It would merely be the guild layer when combining the patterns of a particular garment. If you don?t have a guild layer it would ignore it. I think having guild emblems makes for better role-playing than just having text strong over somebody head.
