Ultima Online: Samurai Empire Diary #3

RPGVault continues their Ultima Online: Samurai Empire diary series with a third installment, this time with programmer Joshua Kriegshauser discussing new wearables for characters. An excerpt:
The ability to wear hundreds of different items presents some interesting technical challenges. How many equipment slots should your character have? How does the graphics engine determine the order in which to draw the clothes? Do we need to prevent certain combinations? What about different colors of clothing? The challenges are compounded by the fact that Ultima Online supports two clients, the original 2D client and a newer 3D one. Furthermore, the server must refer to clothes and equipment in such a way that both the 2D and 3D clients will know how to render the character correctly, and the clients should share as much data as is reasonably possible.