Alright, so, I had an idea regarding the way digitigrade legs bend in another thread, and decided that the concept deserves its own discussion and suggestion area. Here, take a look at the legs on these two images.
http://i.imgur.com/k3nRAkJ.png
http://i.imgur.com/F4FyHQ6.jpg

Do you see the difference? The first one is one of my characters, Jenna, whom I recently got an image of from a kind individual. The second is YamaOrce's lizardfolk hunter. No offense to the guy who did my image, but Jenna's feet feel flat, like they were designed on a plantigrade design and because of that are a static construct, bending the same way a human foot does. Digitigrade feet don't really work like that. In fact, they're off balance, and unless Jenna was consistently leaning forward she'd have no heels to stand on. This is bad design for digitigrade feet. It doesn't feel right. Also, the way Jenna's left foot is up, but hanging with all the toes out; try letting your hand go limp and you'll see why that doesn't make sense - you get some curl, the fingers naturally flow together. same deal here.

Meanwhile, the lizardman? Look at the structure of the legs of him and his dinosaur; they bend back far enough to allow for a "heel" position, meaning there's less concern for balance as long as the subject is hunched a bit forward. but also look at the position of the leg in motion, the one that isn't holding the lizardman up. Toes pointed down with some curl inwards at the end, second joint bent slightly, similar to the primary knee. The ones on the ground splay out from this curled position in a natural way. This is some beautiful digitigrade foot design. If you need another example, look at a cat or dog's hind legs when they're walking sometime - they do the same thing. Hell, if one were worried about kicks, a digitigrade foot like this could curl up and form a sort of fist. It can follow the exact same design scheme as the plantigrade leg with only a little additional bending.

(For the record, Plantigrade means flat feet, like the feet humans have, while digitigrade is the bent feet we often see on monsters)

Remember the digitigrade feet back in CoH? They didn't move. Below the knee, you had a static piece of flesh that often looked quite weird. the reason for this is because of the animation rigging and leg skeleton. You see, as I explained in another thread, A character's body has four pieces. First, is the animation skeleton. This is the different parts that move in different directions, stretching and manipulating the other pieces. The second is the animations themselves, which inform the animation skeleton and tell it how to move. However, both these things are invisible conventionally, without a program to show them in action. The third and fourth pieces are aimed at fixing that - mesh and texture. Mesh is basically a wireframe you place on a "skeleton" and then mold into the shape you want it to be in. this by itself is also invisible, but it provides a canvas for you to paint on, a shape for you to color. that's what textures are - the layer of "paint" applied to a body, a mesh. Skin tone, the color and cloth of a man's suit, the shine of that leather? That's all texture.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjUREj4SUQs]Here's a video from back in 2014 showcasing textures and lighting, primarily.[/url] It should give you a sense of what I'm talking about at least.

Meanwhile, [url=http://i.imgur.com/A6yaeGA.jpg]This image[/url] shows you what an animation skeleton looks like, and the surprising complexity it has. this is the one that the majority of animation modders in Skyrim use; it has wings, a tail, the eyes, all the standard humanoid features, and the balls of color represent the swing and curve a joint can enact; for example, look at this skeleton's knee versus the tail (which is sticking out of the back, not the thing hanging at the side. Pretty sure that thing on the side is a weapon sheath) - the tail can swing in basically every direction, so the colored balls are near solid in all directions. the knee, meanwhile, is relatively locked into two directions, and can only go a short distance in either.for an additional thing, check out the enormous bundle of joints in the hands - they're solid white there's so many there.

Something else you may notice about the legs and feet, however, is how they're structured - from the knee down, there's no bend until you reach the foot, at which point it bends at the ankle and then turns into a flat plane. This is fine for plantigrade feet like humans have, since while the human foot bends we're rarely looking down there, making the whole "plank foot" phenomenon relatively okay. It becomes much more noticable when you have a digitigrade structure, however, due to the fact that digitigrade feet tend to bend like hands do, and have a second knee that looks extremely strange when rigid.

So, apologies for the preamble, but that was largely to get everybody on the same page. Now, here's the thing - normally when you want additional body types with additional bend and all that, you need entitrely new animation skeletons. This is why there's basically no games on the market nowadays that let you control things like centaurs, nagas, or similar - animation skeletons are HARD. After that, every new skeleton requires new animations, a new mesh to overlay it, and textures to go over that. It's a long process, difficult, and the reason animation skeletons get reused constantly is because using it multiple times saves a lot of time, effort, and resources.

My suggestion is not to have additional skeletons in the game, but instead to attach digitigrade legs to the normal skeleton. If there's two sets of legs and animations at the waist down, but you only mesh and texture one of the two, the result is that you get a normal pair of legs. This means you can have a second pair of legs and animations applied that are effectively invisible, which would easily allow for you to only have one pair. MWM has already show themselves to be capable of variable clothing overlays, so if we had a digitigrade leg skeleton for them to mesh over, a solid portion of the work would already be complete. The uses for this animation style aren't just for us players, though - this would also be extremely useful for minions, monsters, monstrous individuals, and assorted other enemies, as it'd lay a design framework for some potentially very interesting stuff. This would effectively be a moderate increase in workload for every animation and clothing piece in exchange for spoofing an entirely new animation rig, which is pretty awesome as an idea.

I don't know how likely this is, but I'm hopeful. Thanks for listening to my ramblings and ideas.