Ok, I’ve just come up with an idea for making the hood in my Zelda game. I thought I might try and ragdoll it. But there is just 1 problem. How do you create a ragdoll? And would this make the hood look ok? It is a seperate object to the link mesh.
If you could disguise the fact that the hood isnt joined to the link mesh then yeah it to should look ok. But i’ve no idea how to make a ragdoll im afraid, i do know its something to do with ball constraints.
Or of course you could save yourself alot of hassle and use an armature! 
Yeah, but with an armature I couldn’t really make his hood trail behind him when he falls, or make wind look windy. And it would be nifty to know.
To “ragdoll” something, it needs to be a dynamic object. And if you want if attached to a bone, you will need the latest test build, as the parent to bone feature was just recently reimplemented in the game engine.
To make a dynamic object “ragdoll” to a bone (only works with recent test builds, unless you are reading this after a post 2.44 release):
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Select the first joint of your bone. (select armature | press tab | select joint | press tab again)
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Add an empty. (Space>Add>Empty)
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Parent the empty to your bone. (select armature | Ctrl-Tab | selelect EMPTY | select BONE | press Ctrl-P>Bone)
4. Give your dynamic object a hinge constraint to your empty,
A. Select the empty, than shift>select the dynamic object
B. press F7 (notice the buttons window. make sure the axis is selected, not the red/yellow square. you should see 2 of those little black axis icons pressed.)
C. find (and click) the "add constraint" button > "Rigid Body Joint".
D. click the drop down menu that says "ball"
E. select "hinge" from the menu
F. press the "show pivot" button. this will show you where the hinge between your objects is. the hinge constraint allows rotation only around the X axis, so adjust the Pivot X/Y/Z and Ax X/Y/Z values till the x axis is where you want the hinge.Using an armature would be easier. Think about this.
-Running- just animate the hood flowing behind him and have it triggered by a ray sensor ( to show he’s on the ground) and w key ( or whatever you use for running forward).
-Turning- Animate it at the oposite angle of where he’s turning and make the priority lower than running so it works when he turns and runs at the same time.
-Falling- Animate the hood going up and use an inverted ray sensor.
-Wind- I guess you would have to use ragdoll, but my bet is that you will run into tons many bugs with a segmented hat and rigid body constraints, and you shouldn’t let a stupid green hat ruin your day.
Well, you never know when you might want to use a ragdoll. Maybe a rope, or a chain would look good with one. So I guess a good place to learn is something simple like his hat.