Ok, this might sound a little confusing, but I think we should be able to assign certain skins to names. So when you want to change your handle (i.e. [720*] Nick to [COP] Nick), your skin changes too, instead of having to pit, change and then come back out. It would make it a fluid motion instead of having the wrong name with the wrong skin for a couple seconds. Catch my drift?
Okay, maybe you don't understand why I would want this. There are cruise servers that have a copping system and distance bonuses (i.e. TC and LTC) but to be a cop, you have to pit and change your skin to a cop car skin. So instead of pitting and losing distance bonuses, you can change you name and your skin changes, too.
[EDIT] - I understand how this would be useless on race servers, but on a cruise server it makes sense.
Solution is that each nickname already stores the last skin used for each car. You only need to change your nickname.... then shift-P (it auto swaps the skin in the pit screen) then press enter to come out. Yes, you must pit. It's probably better this way anyway, because I imagine the annoyance for everytime someone changes name, (which can be easily done often and it is possible to spam XXX changed to XXX) that your PC downloads another skin OR freezes for a breif moment to load the dds file into memory. Allowing this all the time would annoy many people. At least now you have to make the effort and pit/rejoin which sorta stops this type of skin/PC load/net load abuse.
It's a good idea (in theory), but would not work in LFS's current complex system of "join race" >> "send new skin to players" method and I think the request is out of scope for LFS.
[edit: well, actually it might not be that much code to modify, but there are also things that are not so visible to change like for example how InSim monitors the current skin so some moderate re-coding would be required.]
But the main argument here for -1 :
If your chosen server is resetting distance bonus when you pit, they have chosen that particular outcome. Maybe take it up with them. They can restore distances for any player at anytime with their inSim app. automatically. It's their systems resetting the bonus when you pit, not LFS's.
