Clothes as Items

Clothes as Items

On some servers clothes are inventory items: a jacket in the bag, a mask you put on and take off, a stolen hat. ATY Clothing works with that out of the box when it runs next to aty_inventory, and it keeps what the character wears, what the inventory says is worn and what the database has saved as one story. This page explains the model, every setting, the console commands and how to plug in another inventory.

If you only want it on: install both resources, start aty_inventory anywhere in server.cfg, and leave Config.ClothingItems as it is. Everything below is detail.

The problem it solves

With clothes as items, what a character has on exists in two places:

• the skin the clothing menu saves (playerskins on QBCore, users on ESX), and
• the worn kit, the items the inventory says the character has put on.

Left alone the two drift apart, and every way "clothes as items" can feel broken is that drift:

The model

          ┌──────────────── skin → items ────────────────┐
 shop · creator · /skin · wardrobe outfit · login · API
          │                                              ▼
     saved skin  ───────────────────────────────►  worn kit + bag
          ▲                                              │
          └──────────────── items → skin ────────────────┘
              the player puts an item on or takes one off

Skin → items. After every save the skin made, the inventory is handed every clothing slot of the skin and brings the worn kit into line:

It is idempotent, so running it after every save never piles items up.

Items → skin. When the player puts a clothing item on or takes one off — dragging it in the inventory, an admin command, another script — the inventory says so and the saved skin follows:

• putting one on writes its look into the skin
• taking one off writes the slot's bare value, and the clothes the skin had saved do not come back
• taking a top off also bares the arms, because a jacket's sleeves are the arms component
• putting a top back on restores the sleeves it was made with (the item remembers them), or the arms GTA pairs with that jacket

Only the slots that changed are written, so putting on a hat never rewrites a saved jacket.

When it runs

Setup

Both sides have to be on.

1. aty_clothing — Config.ClothingItems (on by default):

Config.ClothingItems = {
    Enabled = true,
    Inventory = "auto",
    Equip = true,
    OnLogin = true,
}

2. aty_inventory — in its Config.Wear:

Config.Wear.enabled = true
Config.Wear.clothingItems = { hat = 'clothing_hat', mask = 'clothing_mask', torso = 'clothing_top', … }
Config.Wear.clothingRestore = 'bare'

clothingItems names the item each worn slot uses, clothingRestore = 'bare' makes a clothing item come off to the slot's bare value rather than to what the skin had saved, and Config.Wear.bare holds those bare values per freemode model. All three ship ready. They are explained on aty_inventory's Clothing & Wear page. Use an aty_inventory version that has SyncClothing; with an older one aty_clothing prints SyncClothing is missing once and falls back to nothing.

Check it

clothingitems status
clothingitems sync <player id>

status prints whether it is on, which inventory it found and how it is set. sync runs the skin → items step for one online player and says how many items it made. Both run from the server console, and in game for a clothing admin.

What the player sees

• A shop purchase, a creator save or a login that made items says how many ("3 item(s) added to your inventory")
• Pieces that could not become items because something refused (a worn bag whose room is in use, say) are counted in "2 item(s) did not fit in your inventory"
• A slot with a cap, a vest or any other worn item that is not a clothing item is left alone, without a message
• Undershirts, chains, decals, bracelets and arms are not items in aty_inventory and stay part of the skin; Gloves and other carved menus (Config.Slots) are the same
• Every item keeps its exact look and a label such as Top #60-1, and the inventory shows a photo of that very piece when the photo studio has taken one

Other inventories

aty_clothing is not tied to one inventory: each is a small adapter in server/items.lua, and anything else can be reached with the custom hook. Which ones are possible depends on what the inventory's authors publish. This is what was checked, and where.

The custom hook

Config.ClothingItems = {
    Enabled = true,
    Inventory = "custom",
    Custom = function(src, pieces, skin)
        -- pieces: { component = id | prop = id, drawable, texture, gender, arms?, arms_2? }
        -- Hand them to your inventory. Return how many items you made and how many you could not.
        local made = 0
        for _, piece in ipairs(pieces) do
            -- e.g. exports['my_inventory']:GiveWornClothing(src, piece)
        end
        return made, 0
    end,
}

pieces lists every clothing slot of the saved skin in GTA's own ids — the same list aty_inventory is given, bare slots included (a prop below zero, a component at its bare value) — so your function decides what a bare slot means for your inventory. skin is the whole saved skin. An error inside the function is caught and printed once; it never stops a purchase that has already been paid for and saved.

For developers

The pure part — which pieces a skin has, and what a change of worn items means for a skin — is server/clothing_pieces.lua, covered by tests/items.spec.lua. server/items.lua holds the adapters and the events.

Troubleshooting