Ignoring the NPC discussion, I would like to further share my investigations and speculations on the edit mode (since I'm a scener).
General layout: Comparing to the old editor, the new one seems to have obviously improved, regarding the general layout and technical usability. It becomes user-friendly at a glance, it has a modern, compact and intuitive interface, while maintaining some of its old aspects, thus making it easier to learn for the existing Warband sceners. One questionable thing is the autonomy of the editor. As we know, the current one is integrated into the game. This new one though, looks to have some sort of autonomy, so it is highly possible for it to be stand-alone. I made this conclusion after seeing the "No scene loaded" indicator on one of the screenshots. Speaking of this, we wouldn't need to travel on the game map to find a scene and edit it; instead, editing a certain scene would only require to start the editor and load a scenario. This fact is still questionable, but all the "proof" seems to point in this direction, which, in my opinion, is good.
Editor's tabs: While we can't see all the (new) editor's tabs, I can elaborate on some of them which are visible on the current screenshots.
Properties: First off, we got "Properties": this particular tab leads to some general scene options, like effects, lighting, shading, weather, terrain borders, flags, video options, etc. These settings give much more choice and flexibility for the scener, because changing the terrain border wouldn't require to leave the game, edit the "scenes" file, then go back again. Same goes with the video options: you can enable or disable various effects in real time, without having to leave the editor for that purpose. Moreover, it looks like you can change the flags of particular objects, like giving them lods, shadows, visibility and aligning. In short, with this tab we can do stuff that right now requires (boring) manual coding.
Elevation: Now this is the most interesting part. As we know, it is quite a challenge to make a realistic terrain with the desired effects. The ideal would be to have realistic slopes and ridges, but we've yet to see this. For now, I can see that we got a "slope filter" and "direction filter". I barely know what this is, but as an idea, it would be easier to play with the elevation brush, without damaging stuff you have elevated already, depeding on the values you select on the filter. My only hope in this case is to have more terraforming possibilities, just like I have said: making slopes and mountain passes without having to deal with bad terrain geometry.
Water flow: There's still no evidence of what that tab contains, but hey, it wasn't made for the beauty contest (
): that means it should play a role in the editor. The word "flow", easily matches with "direction", so yes, I guess that we'll be able to give flowing direction for rivers, unlike having static water, like it is now. This could also mean making rivers that go down from hills or whatever.
Paint: And here are, probably, the old "ground texture" and "ground paint" tabs in a nutshell. Since the whole editor has improved, it might be possible to choose between more ground textures, and why not add a new one, if you're a modder. We'll see.
Flora: Well, well...the first impression you make when you throw your eyes at this tab should be: "they really weren't lazy to make plants, were they?". Indeed, judging from the scroll bar, we got more plants to play with, and as they said, it is now possible to paint flora in clumps, without having to add them one by one. What's intersting is that stuff got more properties, like weight, hardness, randomization limiters, noise and height.
Inspector: Logically, this should be the mode with which you can check the values of various stuff on the scene or just freely explore it (maybe it is the counterpart of the "Ctrl+H" hotkey we got in Warband).
AI mesh: Right, it's not there (in the screenshots, at least), and I'd be so happy if it didn't exist. Let's cross our fingers and hope that TaleWorlds has an advanced path finding engine that doesn't require one hour of your precious life to "path" a new scene.
That's my thought, and I hope the developers like it too.
P.S: Until it's not too late, I beg you, don't make the town scenes in bits. Make them be integral.
