I have these here idear, and was hoping to get an estimate on their' doability:

First, I'd like to make new maps, but also retro-fit old ones, to where it's announced where the player is to all opponents.

I think this would be cool for JKArena. Scenario: No Force duel Canyon Oasis, you're grabbing all the shield pick-ups, and an announcer with text pops-up saying "Playor is picking up shields!". But it's probably too hard to guess what the player's doing... But then a description of the area would be kinda vague, and making players memorize arbitrary names of zones seems lame too.

Point is, Player X knows where you are now and would like to interrupt your rondeveu with the shield pickups. This could really help in huge levels I'm always making, but never having the buddies to play them with. It's at most three guys playing my maps, and we spend too much valuable time lost.

What would you do? Put in ghosts, each with a message, and the one closest to the player is the one that prints?

Use FirstTimeInSector (or whatever it is). This isn't doable with old levels, I think.

Second, I came up with a monk temple CTF level with sabers only where even Lightning and Destruct projectiles vanish, so you're only choice is to catch up to muddoofahkuus and make 'em taste your blade. But to force people to actually fight over the flag instead of running away, players enter little mini-arenas and duke it out.

This would take some cogging, obviously, and I have a collegue with da cogging cat skillz, but mabey you have a totally different approach?

Anyway, I just had these ideas, want to know what anyone reading thinks.

inputappreciated

It should be possible to display a map (topdown view of the level in form of a texture slapped on a small 3do that is placed in front of the player's screen), then place dots on this map where the players are. You could even place numbers there to compare them with the player list.
Look in the showcase forum for a thread called something like Radar detection (quite recent) started by Darth Slaw.

The other thing should be possible, too. But I'm not sure if it's a good idea. It kinda interferes with the team aspect, where the flag carrier runs and the other teammates back him up. I think it would be better to give the flag carrier a slightly lower speed.

Thanks, I saw that thread-I don't want that accurate of location. And I was thinking you could put any number of players in a skirmish area, so it becomes a kind of Risk scenario, and putting all your apples in one basket is better than two stones in the bush.

It seems that I didn't get what you meant with "players enter little mini-arenas and duke it out". Care to explain it further?

The location awareness thing could be done with waypoints. Place ghosts in the level, cog checks player distance to each ghost, outputs text related to closest ghost.
Or you could write a cog that checks distance to important pickups like raildet, conc, fullshield, etc. and warn everyone when someone gets near.