I think this maybe a way to give players pets in an easy to implement manner.
These will be just show pets, they follow you around but dont interact with the world in any way.
Add one slot to the paper doll, a pet slot.
If a pet is placed in this slot a pet will followthe character around using the Cargo disk code.
technicallyy the pet would be a cargo disk but without bulk capacity anda pet graphic instead of the disk graphic.
Cargo disks dont show on another players screen since they exist client side only.
Pets would suffer the same problem if this trick was used to get pets in game.
How to solve this possibly:
When you meet a person in game the server tells your client what items he has in each of his/her character slots so that your client can display this (a persons armor and stuff)
Your client could pick up on this pet slot and display the pet the person has.
Unfortunatlythe server would have to transmit positional information for the pets.
We dont want this as we would get more lag.
To solve this we just let the server transmitIF a person has pet equiped (yes or no) and what kind it is (pettype 1, pet type 2, etc)
We let the client deal with positioning the pet, It simply always displays a persons pet to his/her right side for example
basicly the pet would exist completely Client side, like the cargo disk.
Now for pets we need graphics.
Take a few existing mob design and shrink them to pet size for graphics.
some of the domestic animals might be nice to use.