So, what are the things you hate/dislike/wish there was in Hammer?
Things like the infamous carve tool, convex brush limitation, stability issues, doesn't work out of the box with gmod, and so on.
[sp]I'm working on a level editor and I'd like to avoid Hammer's flaws and improve upon it.[/sp]
after seeing the source 2 editor, the current hammer editor just feels plain out of date
It's really [img]http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/images/1/19/Obsolete.png[/img].
I hate it when unique glitches and problems appears when you are about to complete the map, it's really annoying.
Obligatory: when you create a cylinder and forget to change the brush type back to normal.
[QUOTE=HGrunt;45856443]Obligatory: when you create a cylinder and forget to change the brush type back to normal.[/QUOTE]
Would something like C4 Engine's Editor GUI would be better for that? Icons instead of names.
[QUOTE=da space core;45856385]after seeing the source 2 editor, the current hammer editor just feels plain out of date[/QUOTE]
I'll leave this as it is.
Also i hate working on angles that are not 90° and 0° in Hammer 1. (Hammer 2 relative grid ftw <3 )
After i finished my current projects i'll switch over to source 2. Readying my self up for the day valve releases/ports another game besides Dota 2.
I'm awful at Hammer and I spent a good 30 minutes trying to make this goddamn archway and I finally did it and it didn't appear ingame
[t]http://i.imgur.com/zCwcvEH.jpg[/t]
damn you Hammer.. damn you
That's probably entirely your fault, anyone could Hammer that out in a few short moments with no issues.
You probably screwed up your brushes.
On topic, I really dislike how objects don't seem to deselect when creating overlays. Especially annoying when you need to create 4 or more consecutively.
[QUOTE=Crypt19;45857475]That's probably entirely your fault, anyone could Hammer that out in a few short moments with no issues.
You probably screwed up your brushes.
On topic, I really dislike how objects don't seem to deselect when creating overlays. Especially annoying when you need to create 4 or more consecutively.[/QUOTE]
It was my fault and I got it working, except I still firmly believe it should've worked before and will still blame Hammer
No real time lighting
Everything. Not much good in the editor, sadly.
Pretty much just the issue of trying to creat things on an angle without brushes going "NOPE". Relative grid resolves this.
Maybe something I'd like to see though is being able to run I/O and see entities doing shit they're set up to do to debug them. Like doors and elevators and trains and other moving/active shit. Fine tuning is annoying when you have to compile and reload the map every slight change.
Something cool also would be random rotating. Say you select a batch of like 30 trees. Hit a button and they randomly rotate around their origin.
[QUOTE=Statua;45859330]Pretty much just the issue of trying to creat things on an angle without brushes going "NOPE". Relative grid resolves this.
Maybe something I'd like to see though is being able to run I/O and see entities doing shit they're set up to do to debug them. Like doors and elevators and trains and other moving/active shit. Fine tuning is annoying when you have to compile and reload the map every slight change.
Something cool also would be random rotating. Say you select a batch of like 30 trees. Hit a button and they randomly rotate around their origin.[/QUOTE]
Regarding the random rotating, I was thinking about adding Lua scripting and it seems like something that would fit right into the scripting category.
Like if you have a selection make a script that iterates over all the selected objects and rotate their yaw randomly. Then add it to the GUI or as a hotkey.
[sp]I'm making my level editor work with any game engine, so knowing how things actually behave in order to test something like I/O is kinda out of the scope. But on the other hand there's no BSP so compile time should be almost instant. (unless the game engine does use BSP or other time consuming process)[/sp]
The thing that irritates me the most about hammer is the fact that the grid isn't just a helper for building, but rather that brushes absolutely must be on it. Arbitrary placement and rotation of brushwork would make it like a whole new tool for me.
[editline]31st August 2014[/editline]
Other than that, I'm also kind of bothered by the fact that you can't create brushwork with only one face. If I could vertex manipulate a surface the way I wanted it without having to worry about the rest of the brush vertices, I would be so happy.
[editline]31st August 2014[/editline]
It's sort of hard to complain about the editor itself without encroaching on issues with the actual engine.
My biggest beef is the udder lack of precision of the VMF format. There are certain brush shapes that although while valid, are utterly mangled and corrupted by the VMF format.
Brushes are stored as planes, as in each face is an infinite plane clipped by intersecting planes of other faces on the same brush (which is why you can't have a concave brush.) This mostly wouldn't be an issue if there was enough decimal precision on the clipping calculations, but unfortunately there isn't.
Here's an example of what I mean:
Original brush:
[t]http://i.imgur.com/iCk8ZQh.png[/t]
Same brush after saving the map and reloading it in hammer:
[t]http://i.imgur.com/ncgV1pT.png[/t]
Basically since the face planes intersect in such a strange way and don't have enough precision, they end up creating multiple vertices that are attached to face corners and nothing. Selecting the erroneous verts is difficult since the 2D views treat them all as a single vert, which leaves you only the 3D view. You can actually grab the individual points and split the brush apart like peeling a banana.
Brushes that are corrupted like this are unfixable and have to be remade from scratch, and made in a different way other than it was originally or the problem will happen again. Attempting to "recombine" the erroneous verts into a single point will just make the corruption worse the next time the map is saved and reloaded. I had one brush that had a corner with something like 27 vertices all in one point. Oh and the corruption is cancerous and usually spreads to adjacent brushes.
Leaving corrupted brushes like this alone leads to lots of bizarre problems (leaks, visleaf errors, lighting errors, etc.)
You can imagine this becomes a fantastically complicated and irritating problem when your entire map is made out of strange brush shapes:
[t]http://i.imgur.com/IC3RBl9.jpg[/t]
When Hammer randomly doesn't want to compile your map and it doesn't say why.
[QUOTE=GiGaBiTe;45860427]My biggest beef is the udder lack of precision of the VMF format. There are certain brush shapes that although while valid, are utterly mangled and corrupted by the VMF format.
-Stuff and more stuff and pictures-[/QUOTE]
I tend to use displacements for natural shapes and brushes for man made ones. Much easier. May I ask why you didn't use displacements?
Nonetheless, the corruption of brushes does have the tendency to get very annoying lol. Especially the degenerate faces that randomly appear throughout your project.
[QUOTE=Statua;45860491]I tend to use displacements for natural shapes and brushes for man made ones. Much easier. May I ask why you didn't use displacements?[/QUOTE]
Because it was supposed to be a 1:1 map port of lavagiant from Unreal Tournament 1999, but I've had to do some layout changes to work around the corruption.
And I'm not a fan of displacements in general, I try to use them as sparingly as possible.
That's purposefully making mapping more difficult though. Displacements are great, learn to use them right.
The fact that there is a hotkey for the sound browser but not for paste special.
-No setting for rotation degrees (there is one in the tools but its only for 15 degrees)
-No easy way to place a bunch of rocks and stuff quickly
-horrible performance
The random crashing after hours of work unsaved
[QUOTE=LATTEH;45862423]-No setting for rotation degrees (there is one in the tools but its only for 15 degrees)
-No easy way to place a bunch of rocks and stuff quickly
-horrible performance[/QUOTE]
Accurate rotation, good point. (I got used to never rotate and just use the vertex/clipping tool instead)
By rock placement it seems you're talking about something similar to terrain editing tools. a GUI for selecting models and placing them instead of copy pasting entities and manually going through the menus to change the model could be a nice start.
[QUOTE=zan;45862622]The random crashing after hours of work unsaved[/QUOTE]
Yeah, stability issues are a bitch. I personally got used to ctrl+s after every action.
[QUOTE=zan;45862622]The random crashing after hours of work unsaved[/QUOTE]
I disabled autosave when I realised that most of the crashes I experienced happened during autosaving.
It would be nice to have a feature that would highlight overlapping and off grid brushes
[QUOTE=LATTEH;45862423]-No setting for rotation degrees (there is one in the tools but its only for 15 degrees)[/QUOTE]
ctrl-m
Point lighting on models, and that models can't seal maps. Leaks in general actually. I just want a modern pipeline and model my environments already.
[QUOTE=seba079;45861765]That's purposefully making mapping more difficult though. Displacements are great, learn to use them right.[/QUOTE]
Not knowing how to use them =! not liking to use them.
Displacements aren't great, they're hacky afterthoughts, as well as the interface in hammer to manipulate them. In fact, pretty much all features of the current hammer are ugly hacks bolted on to the original Worldcraft code, which is likely why Hammer is so unstable. When you pile 17 years of hacks on top of each other, stuff tends to stop working properly.
Hammer(Worldcraft) is actually the 3rd engine hacked in to work with the map editor. It was originally designed for Quake, and you can still find bits of code in the executable and references to Quake specific things.
Quake 3 has something similar to displacements called Bezier Patches. They're far more efficient to make and manage since you can directly edit each vertex without having to use a clunky awkward interface, and get much better results.
Displacements wouldn't work in my case regardless because of lightmap limitations. The lava is one large texture light and without the worldspawn brushes to mask large sections of it off, the lightmap data overflows.
[QUOTE=wazanator;45862312]The fact that there is a hotkey for the sound browser but not for paste special.[/QUOTE]
That's easy to fix. What you have to do is download a resource editor (like XN Resource Editor) and edit hammer_dll.dll in the same directory as hammer.exe. You can change the menus, hotkeys, dialogs, etc.
[QUOTE=GiGaBiTe;45868145]
That's easy to fix. What you have to do is download a resource editor (like XN Resource Editor) and edit hammer_dll.dll in the same directory as hammer.exe. You can change the menus, hotkeys, dialogs, etc.[/QUOTE]
Well damn wish I would have known about that sooner
I'm not a fan of having random models being incompatible with the model viewer thus causing it to freak out and screw up either the model viewer or all my viewports.
This is probably due to lack of experience, but I find lighting really tedious to do
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