Wearable Variants
https://discord.com/channels/1144933990676041768/1322198218569814038
Went "hold my beer" and did this. Genuinely the first time I do anything of substance in Godot. A little PoC-ey because i couldn't be bothered to try and finesse colours into the menu, but they technically are there. Comes with 5 colour presets for leather boots and armour.
This should enable speedier recolours of gear without altering any of the current art pipeline - they can be done with hand recolours or using Tailwind colours as it is, and the current colour is selected by the player ingame. This makes any item easily extensible with non-conflicting skins as they do not actually overlap with the base wearable. It will only be an issue if two numb nuts choose to use the same exact variant IDs for their separate mods. Since the variants are not new items, we have no more item pool pollution issues for those who want different colours. And the player can just change them whenever they fancy it. This shaves off the scripting overhead of any token based systems, along with eliminating the need for extra icons. Essentially reskinning an item can now be done with a mod that has an entry for a variant, if it's a trivial recolour, that's all, but it can have fully custom textures as well.
(obviously, Wearable Skins would have been an unfortunate name)
This being an MVP thing, I can already see room for making it neater that coule be done later - prebake the ready-to-use variants at game start rather than pulling them kind of raw from resources and building them JIT for rendering, this would make accessing the variants done through dictionaries instead of loopy loops. Should be significantly more efficient at scale, since we'd have them grouped by parent items in the first place, so we'd be searching probably under 20 items at once, and without initialising any in the process, but the most important part is having something that works first, then we can optimise.
And if I really go ham with it, there's always an option to doing a search dialog down the road.