YOUR ROLE joins the setup screen at the head of the loadout column -
Racer or Live Cam - so the host still picks the track, the conditions and
the length, and still owns the lobby and marshals every pod, but can hand
its own grid slot back and watch. It rides the existing group machinery
(kRoles through GroupSize/GroupTitle/ItemName), so there is no new UI
code, and it persists in pilot.cfg beside the rest of the loadout.
Offered only when Steam is configured, the same condition the HOST and
JOIN buttons use: the role means nothing without a lobby to host.
In the egg the host's own entry becomes hostType=1 and vehicle=camera.
Those two are what RPRegistry::MakePlayer reads to build a camera
director rather than a racer, and they are all it takes - the arcade
selected its camera cabinet exactly this way, from egg data alone.
The pick is honoured only when other pods are actually in the race.
pilot.cfg remembers Live Cam, so someone who set it for a lobby race and
later launched a single-player one would otherwise hand the map load a
camera host with no peers, which is the one configuration known to hang
it. With no extras the choice is logged and ignored and the host races,
which is what pressing LAUNCH on a solo game meant anyway.
Still open: a camera host with real racing peers has never been tried, so
whether the map-load hang survives contact with a live race is the next
thing to find out; and nothing yet tells lobby members that the host is
spectating, so their room screen just shows one fewer car.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
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