When I first saw the topic I thought it was going to be about the multi player team loading fixes so I didn't bother to read it. Now that I have it sounds like it could have quite a few uses. In the future when muti has improved and in game joining is working it could be very interesting. Add in a way to save variables in multi and each player could bring his own ships and weapons to a game.
Right now it works only at the team level. I'd like to see this work at the player level too as it would add a lot to multiplayer but doing that would require quite big changes I suspect (I'd have to find a way of saying x ships of class y belong to player z and prevent the other players using those ships. Furthermore I'd have to find a way of passing that information on to the clients). That said it's certainly something I'd love to see happen.
With some other features it could even be possible to loose those ships and weapons at respawn and have to pick new ones from your reaming arsenal. In a TvT the other team could "capture" your weapons when you die.
Not only possible to add but I reckon it might not even be difficult. To make the idea work I'd simply have to get both client and server to subtract 1 from the loadout totals as soon as a ship respawns (easy), Call the swap parse class function either just before or just after respawn (not particularly hard I'd imagine) and design a new packet to pass on the revised ship numbers upon a change (Can't see this one being too hard either).
The only difficult bit is having the player pick which ship he can use. Right now I could probably code it to simply give the player the next ship in line very easily. You'd start with whatever you picked and slowly work down to the crappy ships towards the end of the mission (Using alt classes would easily allow the FREDder to choose the order in which the player gets access to ships).
It might be possible to allow the player to choose which class and weapons he uses on respawn. I don't particularly fancy making an in-game interface for it but what I could do is code in all the back end stuff and simply give scripting access to the team struct data. The player can then pick the ship he wants, and have the server call the swap_parse_object() function to swap the players ships and weapons and then pass the information on to the clients to inform them which ship the player is now flying.
Adding SEXPs to change the information in the team struct is probably possible. That would allow you to have mission events affect what is available (i.e if the enemy blow up your destroyer suddenly a lot of your possible respawn choices or maybe even your actual number of remaining respawns change).
from what it looks like all i need to do is get script access to the variables. so when you land at wallachia station, and the buy/sell menu pops upand you buy a satyr class fighter or a container full of bosch, or a hacked trebuchet. i can just add one to the variable and receive that ship and or weapon. id like the crates to be traacked as well. so that in a defend the depot mission, loosing a crate would be costly.
I was discussing something along these lines with Wanderer only yesterday, do you not already have access to variables? (in HEAD builds if not in the 3.6.9 branch)
