Dave is there any way to make the Drone and fighter loadouts random (limited by year of course)? I know Firesoul was able to do this in the Coop Ace script.
Fighter loadouts yes, drone loadouts not really. The drone randomization in coop ace actually comes from the game engine, not the script. To quote directly from his coop-ace code ...
fprintf(fp, "SETTING THE DRONE LOADOUT DOES NOT WORK.\n");
fprintf(fp, "I'm going to leave this in because I put so much work into it.\n");
fflush(fp);
ship->mRemoveItemFromStores( item, value); // DOES NOT WORK
ship->mSetItemInStores( item, Drone_Speed, value); // DOES NOT WORK.
ship->mAddItemToStores( item, Drone_Speed, value); // DOES NOT WORK
The way it's working in the dyna is that drafted ships (where we link the in-mission ship to the server ship using the ship's dynaverse id) get the loadout determined by the server -- always slow drones for server AI with the current server kit. Ships generated independently are automatically given the best drones for their era (done by the game engine).
So in late era we can more-or-less fudge it to determine if a ship will have fast drones or slow drones (med sped is not an option), while in mid-era we can fudge it for slow or med speed.
The three routines you see above (RemoveItem, SetItem, and AddItem) were meant to give the scripter control over the loadouts, but were broken in OP (Taldren changed some internal constants when moving from EAW to OP and never got around to updating them in the OP scripting API -- since we don't have the OP code we don't know what they altered/what they altered it to, so we can't work around it).
The routines to change fighter loadouts work, as do the routines to change parts/marines/shuttles, but not the drones.
I'll keep hacking at it for awhile, but for late era it really looks like the choice is fast drones or slow drones.
dave