I know the startup map can be changed in settings.xml in the programdata folder,
but could perhaps other startup settings like number of bots, faction and perhaps even spawn location also be set in some way?
It would be of great help when making maps.
Also perhaps some sort of spectator mode/map viewing mode with free movement not bound to a soldier, to easily look around maps ingame?
Any chance for something like this being added at some point?

Yes, oh god yes!

There's also a command line parameter map, e.g. rwr_game.exe map=media/packages/vanilla/maps/map1


There's the command line parameter no_ai.

A trick I use to spawn at a specific place is by designating one of the bases as starting base for Greens, though I haven't used that much lately as I'm mostly using the live partial reload feature to see the changes I've made in Inkscape.

That works by launching the game with debugmode parameter and pressing ctrl-F8 to reload the area. It will crash if you or an AI are standing or leaning on platforms, walls or buildings, so use it with care and with no_ai. There are several objects that can't be reloaded live like heightmap, spawnpoints and some others.

Also, you can define a reload rectangle (see map3 and the yellow rectangle) in inkscape to speed up the initial loading if you need to relaunch the game often and are only curious of one area, you'd use parameter partial to activate it.

Now that I mentioned ctrl-F8, I should explain F8 too. If you have a file called reload.txt at the root of RWR folder, you can use F8 to reload certain resources listed in that file each line. E.g. you'd add a line Terrain in the file, and pressing F8 would attempt to reload the textures used in Terrain material. Terrain as a keyword as such happens to be the name of the terrain material RWR uses, not a resource you'd have access to as it's mostly generated programmatically, but you can add regular image filenames in reload.txt too.



If you run in debugmode, you have free camera at F4. There's also a parameter mapmode, but I don't know if it works right these days.

So all this is pretty much in and even in a better way than I imagined it?
Wonderful!