Hehehe I remember building exactly that for a NWN1 PW way back when. It was by far the most satisfying project that never got fully completed, mainly because the script was too tricky and there were no real crafting systems I don't think until Mask of the Betrayer was released. But the workaround was to do dialog options that gave access to different wardrobes with just a massive inventory. It was in a single district, but you'd have a tailor and a milliner and a cobbler all on the same street. Then via convo prompt you could be like yeah, "I want to see what you have in..." 1. knee highs 2. ankle boots 3. sandals. 4 battle stilettoes. 5... You know stuff like that. Which then just had every color and style combo the tooslet made available. So the characters could deck out in their unarmored duds in pretty much any combination.
On the other side of town, you had the armorers and weapon smiths doing much the same, but only with the standard equipment.
That was like the tradeoff, and the way to still maintain a level of aesthetic progression over time within the campaign world for the enchanted stuff. You could choose your look pretty completely, but only at the entry level, for regular unenchanted stuff or unarmored appearance (e.g robes).
It just came down to a little gold and one's imagination, and of course the number of preset-models the game provided at the time, which was actually pretty impressive for its day, and even still. I think each equipment model had at least 3-6 modular components, of which one could color like 3 different aspects. So a sword had a blade hilt and pommel, each with their own options and colorable surface. It's easy to imagine the types, the standard ones from movies and cartoons basically. Some serrated, some curvier, some more or less so, pointed pommel or round, banded hilt or metal with various swoops. All great stuff. One can spend hours just doing that, and it makes everything about the gameplay more rewarding when your avatar actually looks cool. The way you picture the character in your head.
For a starter proof, they could just use the exact armor models that are already in the game, but isolate the elements on each into like 4-6 separate fields that could then be colored independently by the player. Later they could develop more modular designs, but for now, just playing with the colors would yield a lot I bet. In BG2 the player could only control 2 colors on their avatar and often equipment would override stuff regardless, to go from something like that to BG3, where you could color that suit of chain or ringmail or leather any way you wanted to, would be pretty major.
Last edited by Black_Elk; 25/08/21 04:30 AM.
