Save loadouts specific to soldiers.

[NuclearStudent]

It would be cool if we could save specific loadouts for individual soldiers.

eg. My highest ranking troops all have distinct loadouts. "Rondo" is a forward lieutenant with a specific mixture of support grenades, medkits, and stun tools. "Clara" was a flying machine-gunner. "Aino" had a dart gun (Final Mod Pack), a motion scanner, proxy mines, and other indirect destruction and support items.

Micromanaging the equipment of individual soldiers takes a lot of time. Even with the inventory template feature, it takes a while to kit out all of the individual soldiers. I personally have to use pen and paper to keep track of all the different soldier roles and subroles- other people probably use detailed spreadsheets.

Instead it would be nice if we could have, say four loadout slots on the bottom of the soldier equip UI. Right clicking on a slot would set the current items of the soldier as the saved inventory of the slot. Left clicking would equip the soldier with those items. Middle mouse would allow the player to rename the slot.

In practice, it would work something like this-

You start off with a bunch of rookies and some veterans. You load one rookie with grenade-focused gear, and save that loadout as "Nade rookie." Then, you use the inventory template to copy that loadout to some other rookies. You make minor variations to account for the different strengths of all your soldiers, and keep saving your templates as "Nade rookie" for all the soldiers you want to be nade rookies.

Then, you load one rookie with gun-focused gear. You save that loadout as "gun rookie", and use the inventory template to copy that loadout out.

When you get to your veterans, this feature really becomes useful. You would be able to swap between a "Terror Mission" loadout or a "Ordinary Mission" loadout to a "Rookie Handholding" loadout. That way, you don't need to spend as much time throwing rocket launchers and stun rods on veterans every time you want to send untested rookies against enemy psions.

[Arthanor]

The ability to keep a few loadouts and name them would indeed be great. I think we all have loadouts for different roles and it would be neat to be able to save them.

I kind of get around this by having multiple soldiers for the same role, so that when I change someone's role, I can quickly go to another soldier, save loadout, switch back, apply loadout. But it is a much less elegant workaround than being able to just apply a pre-saved loadout.

[myk002]

Fenyő has an implementation of exactly this.  We ultimately went with the simpler implementation that is now in-game, but you can probably merge and build his code.  see: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1986.msg18977.html#msg18977

[Arthanor]

Fenyő did some amazing work! I still wish we had his infinite base idea too.. Unfortunately, I don't think I can go through the code to make this work. It would conflict with the existing layout manager, wouldn't it?

Or I guess I could start from Fenyő's branch and then apply everything but the layout copy/paste commits.. Still sounds complicated..

[myk002]

they don't exactly conflict -- you might have to do some adjustment of button layout, but it's not like the underlying business logic is incompatible.  they would just be entirely different functions.

[hellblade]

This is not a new idea.   And I think it should have been included in Openxcom in the first place.

This is essentially xcomutil(or extender? i forgot which) feature where soldiers with certain name -strings would be equipped automatically with preset equipment.  If you don't want them equipped, then don't add name -strings, it's that simple.

I would like to note, however, that xcomutil never got it functioning as intended.

[NuclearStudent]

I have not the faintest idea how to merge what Fenyo to make a working client. I suppose I know what I'll spent my next Saturday trying!