Hi Sentharn,
sentharn wrote:I've been playing around with CaWE and started and planed a small level to experiment with. I'm used to other editors but finally got the hang of Worldcraft/hammer/CaWe.
Great to hear that! If you ever find a feature that you think is much better implemented in one of the other editors, please let us know. I have only little experience with other editors, and thus any insight is welcome.
Anyways, my question is, should I use the textures that come with the SDK as they are and hope that the directory layout isn't changed in a future release, or should I put them in the map's own directory?
I'm not exactly sure if I understand your question right, but in fact, you cannot move the textures around: What you see in CaWE are not textures, but "materials". Materials in turn are defined in small script files in the DeathMatch/Materials directory, and these definitions in turn refer to the actual texture images in the DeathMatch/Textures directory. (The section "The Ca3DE Material System" at
http://www.ca3d-engine.de/wiki/ has documentation about all the related details.)
In any case, you can rely on the material definitions not changing over time. Should they ever change anyway (e.g. because due to file renames etc.), you can rely on me fixing all related problems for you!
Oh, also, do I need to use a specific entity to make skies emit light? I remember HL had the light_environment...
No, any material can be defined to be a (radiosity) light emitter, either as a regular lightsource, or as skylight. Thus, you can simply apply one of the "Sky" materials, which are accordingly predefined, and CaLight will automatically get things right.
Btw.: I'm currently working on a "Your First Room" Flash tutorial that happens (as a side effect) to demonstrate that exact effect. I'll let you know when it is ready, probably even today or tomorrow.