The loadout has always survived a race - gPersistSelection is why the
setup screen reopens the way you left it - but only for as long as the
process lived. Closing the game was a reset, and the callsign is the one
thing on that screen a player types rather than picks, so it was the one
they had to type again every launch.
pilot.cfg beside bindings.txt now holds both, KEY=VALUE like environ.ini,
one line per group.
BT411 solved this first, in fe_last.ini, and its own comment says why
RP412 never grew the file: BT411 relaunches the process between missions
and would otherwise forget the loadout mid-evening, while RP412 stays in
one process. That made the gap invisible from inside a session and total
across two. Same idea, two differences worth naming:
BT411 saves only on a launch - it returns before SavePersisted when
the player quits. That loses a callsign typed by somebody who then
changed their mind, which is exactly the moment this feature exists
for, so this writes on the way out however the menu is left:
launching, stepping into a lobby, or EXIT GAME.
BT411 takes the stored name as-is. A callsign here is quoted into
frontend.egg, joined into a comma-separated list for the results
screen, and published as Steam lobby member data, so a comma alone
would split one pilot into two on the score sheet. SanitizeCallsign
drops what could end a token early and is applied to what is typed as
well as to what is read, so the file cannot hold what the game will
not accept.
Every index is range-checked on the way in, against the group's real
size rather than a constant - the track list is the one that moves,
since football and the death race carry different maps, so it answers
for whichever scenario is selected. The track is re-checked after the
whole file is read as well, because the file is parsed in the order it
happens to be written and the scenario may arrive second.
Written unconditionally rather than only on a change: it is a few
hundred bytes, and writing every time means a value hand-edited out of
range comes back corrected instead of being quietly re-rejected on every
launch forever.
Verified by round trip. A callsign typed and then abandoned via EXIT
GAME is in the file and back in the box next launch. A file carrying
Ba"d,Na#me loads as BadName; an empty one falls back to Pilot. A
full loadout round-trips value for value; vehicle=999 and color=-3 come
back 0 with the rest untouched; and track=9 under football falls back to
0 both when the scenario is read first and when it is read second, which
is the case the second check exists for.
One correction to my own test rig on the way: cross-process
SetWindowText on an EDIT updates the cached caption, which an external
GetWindowText then reads back happily, while leaving the control's own
buffer alone - so the harness looked right and the game correctly saw
the old name. WM_SETTEXT is marshalled properly and shows the truth.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
c1729e40c7