Creating different armors for mmorpg

I'm trying to create an mmorpg and I can't figure out how to go about putting different armor styles on my character. Just like in any mmo, I want people to be able to wear different gears and stuff. How should I go about making shirts, pants, etc that follow with the animation of the base character mesh?

 

You split model into parts. Armor and the rest of the character. Then you replace those parts when you need different armor.

 

How do you get the armor pieces to follow the animations of the base mesh?

 

Map armor to same bones as character itself? Or parent armor pieces to bones? Or you can always go and see how others did same thing (like UMA)...

 

In most MMOs the characters are cut at strategic places that allow easy replacement with clothes later on, which would be from top to bottom: Neck, Arms, Hands, Hip, Legs, Feet, sometimes there is also an extra cut for hairlines and between Elbow and Shoulder. It might be easier to think in terms of splitting the character where possible shirts, sleeves, pants would start and end
In general though, the full base mesh is rarely visible and you replace body parts with cloth meshes, which means that whenever you see in games that there is skin visible on a belly as example, it is actually a different mesh with a bikini instead of the base mesh with bikini on top, this is to make sure that the polygon count stays low and there are no meshes badly intersecting with each other, since it's hard to deform cloth on top of a base mesh the way that the skin would never poke through.
So what that means is, that for every cloth you practically make a new character part, including adding blendweights to make it move with the skeleton. There are some programs that help speeding up that process a little bit, like being able to copy the weights from the base mesh into the cloth mesh, but unless it's a bodytight, same shaped mesh you will still need to make same adjustments.
There are different ways of approaching this as example you could extrude from your body base mesh (a copy) and then model details into it as a shirt, or you make a completely new model which surrounds the base mesh and then you need to make it match up with the base mesh...or you use a cloth modifier and wrap it around your mesh, create basic cloth animation and then retopologize that or you can use creating a new mesh and a shrinkwrap modifier (if you use blender or 3dsmax) etc.

 

Attach armor to the same skeleton.