[Suggestions] Aircraft Modability Improvements

[Nagho]

Having been watching the X:CE project for quite a while, I have seen so many amazing changes made to Xenonauts because of it. With all the changes, though, an expansion to the ability to mod aircraft still hasn't been mentioned much. This definitely isn't the first time that I've brought up these ideas, but hopefully with its own thread people can post their opinions on it as well, and suggest improvements where they think improvements can be made.

In truth, being the aircraft nut that I am I have actually not touched Xenonauts in quite a while since I couldn't quite mod it the way I want (that and because any time I tried to change a config somewhere I would end up causing the game to crash repeatedly ...) so forgive me if something I mention here isn't relevant anymore.

1. Allow modded in aircraft to be buyable. This is an issue that I noticed a long time ago, and may have been fixed since but I have not noticed if it has been. Essentially, any aircraft that are added into the game cannot be made buyable in the manner that the Condor is. The "Buyable" stat works fine with any already existing aircraft entries, and those "slots" can be used to make custom buyable aircraft by just messing with the stats, but it's a workaround that just causes a lot of headache, especially if the slot that you're using is actually an aircraft you still want to leave in the game.

2. Allow more weapon hardpoints on aircraft. At the moment, the maximum is 4, and that is only if all of them are missile type slots, so it's even less if you want a cannon. This would obviously require UI work so that the additional weapons could actually be used, but this alone would make aircraft modding so much more versatile.

3. Open up customization of weapon slot types. As it stands, there are the Light, Heavy, Cannon, and Superheavy* weapon slots. If custom weapon slot types could be added into the game, each with their own custom inheritances (e.g. the Heavy weapon slot can also carry Light-type weapons), then there is an absolutely huge amount of modding that can be done. This would probably be a pretty work-intensive task, a simpler short-term solution might be to open a config option to disable the auto-win parameter on Superheavy weapons, so at least one extra weapon slot is opened up to play with.

*The superheavy slot can't really be used for custom weapons since it by default is treated as an auto-win, so it's a dead-weight slot.

So, any thoughts? Does anyone think these are good ideas? Or are they terribly unfeasible to implement?