Real Time interior Placement

#1 I imagine it is possible, as essentially this is what the ingame editor does. I think the main problem (at least the one I know of) is that you don't have dynamic lighting, so you would have to wait briefly to re-light the scene.

Play with the editor and that might familiarise you with how this would work.

#2 when you use .difs you'll have to relight the scene everytime you place a new building.
I suggest you use .dts files. shouldn't be to hard to make them cast shadows (player casts a shadow.. even a more detailed one then a .dis does)

#3 How do you make .dts files cast shadows?

#4 I'm not sure how you'd do it really, but I'd assume it'd be relatively close to the way the engine draws the player's shadow. I figure one of the main reasons for not having a completely dynamic lighting system would be speed. Not having to calculate the shadows constantly would save time. That said, if you had dts units, maybe for a RTS game or something, that weren't animated, you could optimize it to create the shadow, but not have to do any recalculations on it after it was fist created.

I suppose that is essentially what it does when it lights the scene and draws shadows for the interiors, so basically maybe you could just modify it to only calculate the shadow for one object. Obviously there could be problems with old shadows overlapping reciently placed units, but thats something you could determine and have routines for that special case.

#5 I had considered DTS objects, But I am not sure if a DTS object large enought for Player to go into is effiecient. But if that is one of the Options, i would gladly use it, Since BSP based Editors ARE EVIL (my opinion).

As for shadows they are not important.