[1.7.10] What would be the most effective way to render hats on players

[FuzeIII]

Hi ! I'm making a hat mod pretty much like iChun's hats mod, but I have trouble figuring how to render properly a hat on the player's head.

 

I want the player to pick a hat and display it on his head. Here's what I tried and the problems I've encountered:

 

• Directly render hat's model on player during RenderPlayerEvent, it works but I've trouble syncing what hat the player picked with all the players on the map, I've considered sending packets, but I wonder how I could do that effectively. Plus the hat would render strangely when in multiplayer.
  
• Spawning an entity on the player and rendering the hat model on this entity. The problem here is that when the player disconnects, the Entity may not despawn. The other problem I have is simply that the Entity won't render and I don't know why (I've correctly setup a renderer for my entity). Plus I'm afraid spawning an entity for every hat could cause some lag issues, .
  

 

I took a look at iChun's code on github, it seems like it spawns entities on the player, but I can't figure out how to do that correctly.

 

If anyone has any idea

[BusyBeever]

Catching the part where the player disconnects is quite easy, just catch the playerloggedout-event and kill the entity there

are you registering the renderer? maybe thats bc its not rendering

[jeffryfisher]

Can't you just extend helmets to make hats? Just treat them like custom cloth (leather) helmets, and even let them offer that small bit of protection (and apply a few enchantments).