stubert: I'm pretty sure it will work with just abomut any editor that outputs a map.
This does sound absolutely frickin awesome. jacmoe explained to me a very long and roundabout way of doing this, that doesn't work very well. I can't wait!! By the way, how will textures be handled? There are many different ways that Hammer can handle textures: .wad, .vtf, and that's just those. Will there be a prefered way to texture a map so that the compiler will handle it without problems?
As for the VIS, will you tell the compiler to read a certain texture, (hint texture for HL) to break up VIS? I almost prefer to do my own VIS leafs with hint brushes, so that would be awesome.
.level would just hold entity information, which then in turn could be read by Ogre as a text file, and then we can just write classes to create entities as we see fit? Will this also be able to create brush entities? Meaning, for example: an invisible box, that we describe how that area functions e.g. moving a player somewhere etc.
A month sounds reasonable to me. Take your time... but the sooner the better.
FYI, note that the HL2 editor can open and edit .map, but not create them, and I would suggest against using displacements. We'll see how those work with this compiler later.
... and now the waiting process begins...