imo just lift every limitation of commercial edition off, instead of the startup screen and wrs. Because that's what sells pro. Everything else can alreay be written as plugin. So lift limatations, so people may spend their time on creating better and more usefull plugins/tools instad of trying to get pro features to comm. I.E if cloth physx would only run on PRO, i would be disappointed.

There is already such an option. The WMP format was plain text until A7. You can still use it by disabling the binary WMP format in options.scr.

Thanks, did not know it can be reactivated
by editing this file.

it's a bit useless though since as far as i know it doesn't support any new features that got added in the meantime. the parser for it also seemed to be slow as hell if you used mesh level geometry.

I think meanwhile there exists a description of the WMB format, so it does not really matter anymore that it's binary.

Not sure about WMP, though.

yes, i think for external tools it's much better to target wmb.

The WMB format is not well documented, IMO it'd be better having a WMB SDK. I quit developing an XML converter after various issues with the WMB format.

WMP itself should be described by XML.
This is a much more clean solution than the propreatary current format.

Also: is there a method NOT to pack all textures into the
WMP file? But rather load the textures from the wad?

This would seriously reduce the size of levels, when using
more than a few. A much cleaner approach than packing everything
into each levelfile.

wmp doesn't include textures. only wmb does.

but i agree about more open and clean formats and that including textures in the level file doesn't make much sense and has many disadvantages.



...and i dislike file format sdks. they are the opposite of open. most of the time they turn out to be some kind of ugly c++ api which is hard to use from other languages like python.

Yes, ment the compiled format, the fileextensions sound too similar.

Basically for a clean approach, Assets and Descriptions
should be seperated.

Since the Textures are every time copied into the levelfile, it creates redundant data.
And thus blowing up filesizes.

Textures can also be reference by using somthing like
an "external" flag for a wad file.
Where the engine loads the texture then from the wad.
Just like it was done with the mdl format..
(Maybe even assigning textures as single files,
and not the closed WAD format)

And that palette file should be eliminated once and for all,
there is not purpose for it nowerdays.