-editing the maps geometry with shapes (e.g. circle, half-circle, half-sphere, arches.....)
this would make mapping a lot easier, especially for beginners
alternatively: geometry templates for complex things
This is imposible without a complete recontruction of the cube engine (there is a reason why they call it the cube engine). The cubes are called in a 3d array, of type class cube, so to add a sphere to the map that can move dynamically accross the map, like an ent, would be impossible.
Basic practice will help you make such shapes. The engine can only subbort a hack to create circles, which is not realy a circle but a series of cubes, which means it has corrners (a true circles has no corners).
Voxal terrain exist to solve such problem, but this only exist in very few engine at this point in time. One of which is the c4 engine, if you want to see how this would work then you can download a trial version of this to see how this works.
c4 engine. This engine is becoming one of the best in the industry.
-browsing the mapmodels with preview pictures
you could do this prety ez using the fileloop function. it take 3 paramaters: i (a varble that it stores it findings in), filedirect (package/base), extention (file extention: jpg, ogz, png). This runs like the loop function but instead of increasing i every pass it sends a file name every frame. Example of this is here
then take a pic of all the models. then use the function guiimage (in the data/menu file, under showmapshot function)
-a mirror-texture
imposible, not until they allow any kind of dynamicness into any part of the engine, your map model will not reflect ever because the envmap is loaded at a light calc (and at the load of a map). It is a static calc like light.
-working sp-elements for all gamemodes(like doors, triggers...)
this has not been worked in but should be, things such as physics on boxes and ppl, such as a conver belt, or movable boxes, as of now all physics is on the client side, therefor not allowings such things to ever hapen as of yet.
This problebly will never happen. The use of lightmaps speeds up the maps rendering capablility. Some computers can not run as of right now the basics if you add dynamic lighting it would kill them. This would require a complete reconfiger of the lightign in cube. NOT HAPPENING ANY TIME SOON.
Angled matt would be nice but as of right now will probley not be comming to. It is right now an on off on every cube, but if it were angled then it would be an other array of 8 points of a cube.
There are hacks for each of the matt types exept water and glass:
Clip: you can set skytexture to 0 and it sets the sky texture to a see through cube
Lava: you can use the lava texture and the texscroll functions and to make the lava move, and then put death and noclip around it with real lava under it.
Death and noclip donot need to have any ablility to bend.
Water: there is a hack, basically you create a texture using whatever water texture you can find, and then use texscroll to make it move. If you make it really thin you can place water inside of the out side texture. NOTE: this is not see through and is realy a big hack that problely will never be used practically.
To fix textures go here .
It is about half way down under shaders. Hope this helped
You Loveable Jerk
chasester