If you could have hammer automate any brush creation process, what would it be?
Stairs?
Clipping?
Random detail buildings?
The entire mapping process start to finish?
Random buildings, because it can eliminate testing bias from players who do not like undetailed maps. This way you could block out something, make it look semi-good with randomization, and have testing done with players who would otherwise not play alphas. Of course detailing yourself will make anything look better, but out of those four I'd choose the randomization, just because of the testing capabilities of it.
Mirroring.
Including equivalent red and blue texture swapping, along with team-specific entity renaming: doors, spawn points.
Also maybe info_observer_points - if there was a way to add one that was based off current position and view in the 3d map viewer, rather than placing them like other entities, I'd have a more accurate idea of the picture it would give. Possible problems with the grid though.
As well as my ideas on Twitter, I'd like to second the point of mirroring / rotation, with fixing up names and such. I would use that for most of the maps I make.
Automated combining of multiple props into a single prop. I know you said brushes but this is a more annoying omission from hammer. Unreal has what's called the "foliage tool" which basically paints a bunch of props, then lumps them into one entity so that they're all drawn as one, greatly optimizing the scene.
To do the same thing in source, you have to recompile multiple props into one inside the modelling program. That either requires you to manually input the coordinates from hammer into the modelling program for each prop, or bring the level geometry into the modelling program for reference. Huge hassle.
edit: I think qc compiling lets you combine multiple smds or mdls into one. Something along those lines. A script could potentially grab a bunch of model names and coordinates from a map and generate a qc.
But if they could be done well, I would really appreciate it. I guess this leaves the realm of automation and enters the realm of VVIS actually being good enough to trust on its own.
It'd be nice if when making a symmetrical map there was just some way to flip it like zpq says. I think someone has told me this is possible via manifests or something but it's so complex I don't want to bother.
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