[karajorma]

Here's a little something I added for BtRL but I'm sure other mods will find a use for it. It's a new flag you can apply to to any individual ship that tells the game to use the ships Alt Name instead of it's actual name in messages.

I know a few teams like to use the Alt Names to show the wingmen's names but until now if you wanted to use them in messages you had to supply that yourself, which led to a lot of messages which started like this "Alpha 2 : [Apollo] ....."
  Tick the box in the ships Editor and you'll get "Apollo: ....." which looks a lot better to me

Anyway here's the build if anyone wants to try it out and give me comments. I'll add the feature to CVS in a few days if everyone is fine with it the way it is.

[Cobra]

Also useful for main BtRL.

[Goober5000]

This was one of the things I was thinking about adding myself.  Now that you've done it I don't have to.

But I would recommend changing it so that the callsign comes from a specific "callsign" tag rather than from Alt Name.  You might want to have callsigns on fighters without alt-naming them.

[karajorma]

In general pretty much everyone I've seen who uses named wingmen simply uses the Alt Name function to name the ship after the pilot flying it. That way the name appears on the HUD. I did think of having a callsign option but it seemed a lot of hassle to add it when it would most likely be redundant. Callsign won't appear on the HUD and I can't think of any occasions when someone would want it not to but would want the ship class identified.

On the other hand the WCS launcher flag allows a ship to only be identified by it's ship class (and if it has an alt name I presume that is used instead) rather than it's name. Once that's unbundled from the flag it gives us the option of having a ship only have the pilot's name appear on HUD and messages. I'm sure the WCS boys would find that quite useful.

Secondly we already have a change-ship-alt-name SEXP allowing the user to change the alt name on the fly. Sure I can add one for callsigns easily but that functionality is already there for alt-names.

So in short I'd need to do a lot of work to get the same functionality out of a Callsign option. I don't mind doing the work if there's a reason but at the moment I can't think of a good one.

[karajorma]

Okay, last chance to change my mind guys. It works the way I want it to for BtRL. If anyone wants it to work differently for other mods now's the time to tell me.