[Nuke]

is there any way to rig the mission simulator to give you access to all the ships and weapons of the currently loaded mod with the default freespace missions. having the people who download mods extract missions from the vp and then modify them tends to turn people away from mods. i know that there is a limit that prevents all the ship icons from being desplayed at once. eighter this limit would have to be broken or include a mod option that would allow you to pick your ship and weapons before you load a mission. then when you load a mission it eighter disables the ship selection screens or skips to the action right away with the ship you previously selected. i personally think breaking the limit would be better so that you can view all the interface art and have better weapon and ship selection options.

[vyper]

If you're meaning what I think you're meaning then the short answer is no, not without destroying the basics of fs2 gameplay by altering the .fs2 reading in the source code (or something similar).  (Yes that was the short answer )
The fighters and weapons available to the player are determined by the mission files themselves.
From what I gather - you want to fly new ships in the main campaign missions? Well aside from ripping open the mission files and adding the new fighters to the "team-loadout", it can't be done without ruining the game engine.

The issue with the source code is that you'd be redifining how the engine interprets the mission files - and by doing that not only would the tech-room allow everything so would normal campaigns (i.e. a mission designed for the player flying a Herc II now has "Super-duper-kill'em-all" fighter in it!)
 Sorry to disapoint!

If I'm making totally the wrong assumptions about what you mean feel free to correct me!

(Edit was to make this make more sense)

[Bobboau]

well I don't think it would be bad if there was some sort of cheat code thing

[phreak]

edit: I read your post wrong, but i should save this just in case

to do this i figure you can separate all ships and weapons into a unique table for each ship

example:

FS2/data/tables/ships/GTFApollo.tbl
FS2/data/tables/ships/GTFHercules.tbl
FS2/data/tables/weapons/ML16.tbl
FS2/data/tables/ships/Kayser.tbl

then there would be a FRED2.tbl that specifies all the tables you can use:

#Ships
GTFApollo.tbl
GTFHercules.tbl

#Weapons
Kayser.tbl
ML16.tbl

[Nuke]

i think you have interpreted my question correctly. however when a mission loads, would it be possible to force freespace to forbid the team loadout information of a mission from being loaded and replace it with information stored in a text file listing a different set of loadout options. the same information would be loaded except from a different source.

[vyper]

Ooh, er.... Yep that would probably work (don't ask me how to impliment it).
You could set a conditional (say "int Mission")
Mission=0 could represent a campaign mission
Mission=1 could represent a tech-room load

Then all you'd have to do is set up a new file handler to interpret your "loadout.tbl" (or whatever) for whatever condition (1 or 0) you want.

(Yes I'm tired, yes all this is a twisted form of pseudo-code )

[penguin]

dunno if this has been said (or if it's already done, even)...

it would be nice if FRED2 had a "test mission" option -- instead of just launching FS2, it would validate and save the mission, then launch FS2 and take you directly into the mission you are editing (skipping the techroom, mission simulator stuff).

(I seem to recall someone saying there was a command line option to go directly to a mission, but I'm too sleepy to look in the code for it right now)