Original Post
Greetings all. I am developing an idea for a game that involves bipedal robots and I want character creation to be as customizable as possible. To this end I envision a system where a user is presented with a 'blank' character, and cycles through different lists of 3D meshes that represent different parts of the body (ie, you could choose from, say, five different 'upper arm' meshes, and 20 different 'waist' meshes - and the system should be ever extensible simply by creating more meshes and dumping them into the assets folder). In a nutshell it is more or less a clone of the City of Heroes/Villains character creator. NPCs could be created by generating a set of random numbers with which to choose meshes for the different body parts. And when playing in multi-player, small strings could be sent to all clients again simply identifying which mesh to use for a given body part. Once a character was generated, each mesh would simply be loaded onto a 'bone' (ie, bone-based animation system). This would allow generic animations (run, jump, strafe, etc) to be quickly and easily developed independent of what any final character model would actually look like (it would also make the system more extensible as new animations could be developed at a later date, in a mod, etc). So, my question is this: are there any current character file formats (and/or projects on the web) that implement anything remotely like this? I think with some work I would be able to create something of my own, but why waste my time reinventing the wheel when I have more important things I could do, right? (Especially if someone else has already done it better than I could, too ;) ) Anyway, any thoughts/suggestions/etc would be great! Thanks!