I've been working on a plugin on the German forums for a while now, and I think it's good enough now to post it here too.
In essence it provides players with a few new commands to control their vehicles:
- Turn warning-, blue- and headlights on and off
- Turn siren on and off (sadly it plays only once)
- If you send a vehicle back to the base, all personnell it spawned with will first enter the vehicle (if possible). Patients and/or criminals get put in the vehicle too. Only when all units are inside the vehicle (unless they're injured or similar) will it return to the base.
- When a new vehicle gets ordered from the menu and a vehicle of the same type is already on the map and returning to the base, that one will get ordered instead and no new vehicle will spawn. To make sure this works as intended, vehicles returning to the base are unselectable.
- If you hold CTRL while pressing the HQ button, all units will enter the vehicle, but it will not return to the base.
There is also a list of all units on the map available, accessible with a new button on the minimap.
I had to disable all automatisms because some don't work well with the new return to base command, to keep that in mind while playing.
Another new feature but useless without a custom map:
You can define parking spaces for certain vehicles (or groups of vehicles) on the map. Instead of directly despawning, a returning vehicle will first try to find a free parking space and if it finds one park there. There's a test map included in the testmod below, so take a look at that to see how exactly it works. There are also special parking spaces for hospitals or prisons to drop off "passengers" there, if necessary.
This plugin is inteded to be used by other mod authors for the added functionality, but the attached testmod can also be used by players to use the new commands.
The sourcecode is attached too, for people interested in that.
Supported Emergency 5 version: 2.0.1