Nubios
Actually it occurs to me that from a testing point of view that it would be less error prone to write a script that programmatically copies and modifies existing .sitem and .sbrick files so we have 8 new colors of everything that can be crafted now (with the exact same stats) along with crafting recipees that produce the new items, we would just need to add a new vendor somewhere that sells the new recipees.
Once we get it working it is a mere press of a button (almost - someone has to enter some hue, luminance and saturation values for the new colors) for any ryzom_core game (that uses masks) to add a new tree of armor and recipees that can be sold by different factions. It is just XML so there must be plenty of libraries for manipulating XML files?
There must be some limits on the number of .sitems and .sbricks but I assume that they are large?
I don't know anything about the late game stuff but my personal suggestion would be that the first set of 'Faction' armor should be sold by the Chlorogoos tribe as it would take some effort for anyone to get enough fame to buy the recipees (everyone starts at -66 fame with them) if they really need that Hot Pink outfit. With a fame of -30 maybe we could get recipees up to level 100, with a fame of 0 we could get recipees up to level 200 and so on. lets put a new portal right into the centre of their camp while we are at it, and a hawker that sells picks that can have spells applied to them and elf costumes and...
Terrible way to do it : it would be a mess in the UI, because you will have a "red" item, shown red in the icon, crafted with red materials, with a "red" color in the description, which will be actually dark green (or whatever you want).
Not to mention the clutter in your crafting windows when you would have 100, 150 crafting stanzas :)
Also, there is a hard limit of 256 differents torso 3D models (in visualprop too). There is around 80/100 currently, so there is a lot of margin, but your method could easily create enough items to reach the limit.
The only good (and feasible) way to do it is changing SPropVisualA/B/C. You have currently 27 bits available, so with 6 colors to change you could get 4 bits of added information per color, which would give 128 differents color available (more than enough IMO).
Finally you still have the issue of obtaining those new items, the easiest way probably beeing a NPC who will trade you any piece of armor and some dye with the same piece of armor with a different color.
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