Brainstorming: Hammer Plugins

[ScarT]

Not sure how any of these would be accomplished, but reading through coder's suggestions gave me the following ideas:
Multiple cordon volumes.
Rotoscoping.
The ability to "comment" maps; i.e. attaching editor-only text to brushes or entities.

a function that splits a face in triangles when with the vertex tool one generates an invalid shape

Edit: holy shit, this.

There's a comment field on every entity, its entities only though

The ability to add support for new file formats (import, export).
Just make the damn thing open source LOL

[Gary]

Id like to have a better connection between 3ds max and Hammer. Basically the ability to select some brushes, click a button and have them imported in 3dsmax.

File > Export to .DXF

[Smurftyours]

3DS Max > File > Import > .DXF

[dissonance]

What do you need rotoscoping for?

http://soimtryingtomakeavideogame.tumblr.com/

[joe_rogers_11155]

I think it would be cool to have a background for the 2d viewports to assist with world-building, similar to how 3d modeling can have a background to base their model. Does that make any sense?

That is, take a picture of a building and put it in the background of a 2d viewport in hammer. Then you can make brushes that are the same general shape as the building because you are "tracing" the building out. That would be pretty cool. You could use a Google map in the top-down view to remake a city block. I guess you would want to be able to put a different background in each viewport, so you could get a front, side, and top-down view all at once.

You would have to be able to re-size the background image so that the subject wasn't too big or small in Hammer. Like, place an info_player_start in the map and then bring in the image, and resize the image until the player's model is roughly proportionate to the subject (a door or window in the building). Oh, that would be really freakin sweet.

[Turd Ferguson]

I think it would be cool to have a background for the 2d viewports to assist with world-building, similar to how 3d modeling can have a background to base their model. Does that make any sense?

That is, take a picture of a building and put it in the background of a 2d viewport in hammer. Then you can make brushes that are the same general shape as the building because you are "tracing" the building out. That would be pretty cool. You could use a Google map in the top-down view to remake a city block. I guess you would want to be able to put a different background in each viewport, so you could get a front, side, and top-down view all at once.

You would have to be able to re-size the background image so that the subject wasn't too big or small in Hammer. Like, place an info_player_start in the map and then bring in the image, and resize the image until the player's model is roughly proportionate to the subject (a door or window in the building). Oh, that would be really freakin sweet.

Joe take a looky: http://www.halfwit-2.com/?page=tutorials&id=213

[joe_rogers_11155]

that is a pretty neat idea...but not quite what i want to do. it seems to be kind of convoluted...and the idea here was to make it simple

[no00dylan]

Real time co-op mapping. Hoo ah!

[Dives]

Real time co-op mapping. Hoo ah!

This is what gets me excited for Id Tech 5. You can get a big team of people all working on the same map at the same time.

[Shrinker]

*bump to continue the topic*

Okay, I don't think I can support cooperative mapping.

But I think I can make a nice todo list for mappers.

And I think I can give them the ability to make their own addons to the editor. It won't be like plugins, it will be much more, since almost all the program logic will be modifiable.

I will have to look into different graphic primitives and parametrized models. It is very likely that I end up with a nice library of basic shapes and an even nicer library of advanced things, all packaged in hundreds of "tools" loaded in a fully-fledged install. My thing will certainly lack some features, but a buttload of tools will be one way to ease the pain!

[Mr. Happy]

I think better axis indicators in hammer would be a simple but huge plus. Something better than three thin lines. Slightly thicker arrows with letters, placed in the corners of viewports, on selections, etc.. Maybe even be able to switch it to the coordinate systems of various modeling packages (e.g. y up) and change the widget size.

Just make the damn thing open source LOL

this, 100%

[Jordash]

I'd like to see 0.5 0.25 and even 0.125 grid spaces (makes smoother curves easier)

sketchup style components would be cool if it's possible

being able to move the rotation / grid snap origin on groups would be handy

[Shrinker]

Well the grid I've once showed off, with which you can snap to any ellipse or any regular grid spanned by three axis vectors, is obviously going to be part of this editor. On top of that, it'd be a pretty lousy editor if it wasn't possible to use an arbitrary origin for rotations!

Also, grid snapping below those values that Hammer can work with is easy, but the Valve BSP tool does snap brush corners to whole grid units again.

Better indicators... yeah. I'll have to keep that in mind if my coloring of grid axes (you can easily distinguish XYZ + and -) is not enough. I was also thinking of having a means to display text in the 3D viewports, controlled by the tools. But I'm not that far yet!

[Jordash]

Also, grid snapping below those values that Hammer can work with is easy, but the Valve BSP tool does snap brush corners to whole grid units again.

I remember it used to, even snapping then every time you load a file,but I don't think it does anymore. I've been using the sketchup plugin when I load it in nothing is on the grid but everything is in it's place and it has leaked... yet.

[zombie@computer]

vbsp doesnt snap to grid at all. Brushes are saved as a collection of planes, using a standard floating point precision, and using some outerworldly algoritm these planes are transformed into a collection of points. Only points < 0.01 (or some other arbitrary number, Valve calles it EPSYLON iirc) away from the nearest gridpoint are rounded (as in, moved towards the nearest whole number coordinate). Don't believe me? The sourcecode for vbsp is given, so you can look it up; you will be searching for clipwinding* functions.
Hammer may round some vectors, i dont know as i dont have its sourcecode (except a very old hammer), but i cant imagine Hammer rounding vectors at random, possibly corrupting every non-cubic brush in the map, for no reason whatsoever (points on grid are in no way rendered or handled faster than points off grid).