Limelight Forums

Suggestion: Player Cosmetics
These cosmetics would be simple things; Hats, Glasses, other prop-made outfits and general stuff like that. This could easily be implemented with PAC3 (albeit restricted in order to prevent people just using unrealistic outfits they made themselves)

In detail, explain your suggestion:
PAC3 (Player Appearance Customizer 3) is a Gmod addon that allows you to customize how a player model looks. This can be through adding items and props to the model, among other things. The best thing about PAC3 is that, using the playermodel skeleton, models positioned would in theory be in the same place, no matter what player model is used. Thi could mean that a hat prop could be made, then positioned on any player model. No matter which model you have, that hat will be in the same place bone-wise.

The system would work something like this:
-Player buys an outfit that someone has made from the market (Say, a set of sunglasses and a hat)
-On wearing the outfit, and after the 10 second countdown, the PAC3 outfit is applied to their player model.
-Now, everyone can see the player wearing a hat and sunglasses in-game. If they die, said sunglasses and hat would stick to their ragdoll, or could be made to fall off (among other effects, depending on outfit)

Simple, but effective. Due to PAC3 being easy to use(I am experienced with it, but simple things like arranging props and merging them to specific bones on a model are easy to teach/learn), this could result in potentially dozens of custom cosmetic items being created and put up on to the market.

However, there would need to be restrictions. Only specified people (say, outfit makers, admins, developers, or whoever would be making these outfits) should be able to access the PAC3 editor. In a similar way as to how you cannot change your player model in the context menu, PAC3 could be restricted to prevent someone loading their own outfits. You could also prevent people from auto-loading PACs, and so without buying something off the marketplace it would not be usable. And even then, you would not be able to make your own.

The reason for these restrictions would be simple: PAC3 has many undesirable components; you can change bone positions, and holdtypes, among other things. If it were unregulated, you could potentially have unrealistic characters. However, if the market-based system was implemented, this could easily be circumvented.

Why should this be implemented?
If I remember right, there was already talk of adding cosmetics such as hats and things to the market for people to buy and use. However, the ways this could be done might be problematic. While you could make a hat bodygroup for each model, then add the item to the marketplace, this would be extremely lengthy, and too much effort for one single item. The other method would be adding a script that allows you to put a hat model on to the player model, bone merged, when the item is worn.
But why write a script for this, when there is already an addon that does it? PAC3 has a GUI, meaning you can easily edit the outfit visually, instead of relying on code in order to do it. While it may take some script work in order to get it to work the way it is desired, there would in my opinion be far less work involved.

Overall, this would be an effective way of implementing custom player cosmetics. And if you accept this suggestion, I would happily volunteer to help make outfits/teach someone how to. No use in having a system nobody knows how to use, after all.