Arcueid
I believe the game has an extra texture for every single color. So you have 8+ variants of every single item... Not sure this is a good system to expand on.
If we were designing a new game I would agree with you, graphics cards have come a long way since Ryzom was designed and this should be easily done by the GPU.
My understanding is that the 8 different colors are generated more or less automatically from one greyscale design (+ color masks) so it reduces the labor cost (8 coloured items for the cost of creating one greyscale pattern)
Maybe we could get 16 colours of each item for very little work, I don't know if that is good or not but it might be low cost. ( I like low cost)
There are also two color masks so it may even be possible to get the trim in 8 different colors at a fairly low cost if we are tricky enough.
I also want us to be able to easliy add new armor designs (eventually) but I think this plan is more to extend the number of colors for a low cost.
Maybe it won't work, and we still have to figure out the whole dying thing.