I'm going to do this for all of the stuff in the "data" directory.
It was obviously an attempt to make Starfighter more flexible
somehow, but it fails at that entirely. More importantly, these
things are both unreadable and easy to make mistakes on. Simple
C code is much easier to read.
The only disadvantage is that recompiling is now needed to change
the "scripts", but considering that they had hidden limits and
no one was making custom missions to begin with, I don't consider
this to be a real loss.
As a result, you're not stuck with the weakest weapon in the game
anymore. You have to choose between the double rockets, plasma
permanently upgraded in one area, plasma temporarily upgraded in
some areas, or some combination.
Using <SDL/SDL.h>, or in this case <SDL2/SDL.h>, and others like this
is not the proper way to include SDL headers. The proper way is to
pass the -lSDL2 flag to the compiler. The place I put it might be
awkward, but I'm planning to replace this hand-written makefile with
Autoconf/Automake scripts, anyway.