Wow! lots of posts
A lot of the plugin ideas you guys are tossing out are not only great, I might be able to pull some of them off, as well. I DEFINITELY agree that some planar surface merging, texturing utilities, and sector cleanup tools would be mighty useful.
Why did I bother to write CutMaster? I was/am working on an in-game JK movie/sitcom and got the idea to make a timeline-based list of events, since thats all writing cutscene cogs generally is - lots of little code snippits seperated by Sleep() calls. Yes, I did steal the timeline 'design' from macromedia flash.
I'm working on another tool right now as I write this in fact; haven't closed the project since I started it, and am almost done.
The tool is called LOD Editor, and I'm simply writing it because I don't think there's even a jk tool out there that lets you add extra LOD (level of detail) meshes to a 3do.
This is the main window of the LOD editor tool. The four squares are LOD mesh viewers - each one is programmed to render the seperate LOD meshes of the current model, if they exist. In the screenshot, the top two mesh viewers are active (.3do loader is not finished yet so they are just drawing a rotating line - it looks 2d but it is 3d opengl), and the bottom two are inactive.
An "LOD mesh", or Level of Detail mesh, is an extra copy of the 3do, but made up of slightly less number of vertices, therefore it looks almost the same, but can be drawn faster and the slightly crappier detail is not as noticable. ALL 3dos contain at least one LOD mesh; extra meshes can be added, and these are used in place of the original when at increasing distances from the object in-game.
LEC has done this to almost all of their actor models; this is why stormtroopers or other players, for example, get all blocky when you start walking away from them, and eventually are drawn as a single faces.
JED 3d preview draws models at their lowest-quality LOD mesh.
Ok, back to work on the 3do class!
BTW Lord_Grismath, I think all that I have left of the JP:TC is the jeep cog; if even that.