An alternative to Valve Hammer Editor

[Armageddon]

How do you make brushwork ScarT and choose primitives and entities to place?

[ScarT]

How do you make brushwork ScarT and choose primitives and entities to place?

Same way as you currently do. There's keyboard shortcuts for all tools, so having the tool bar shown in pointless if you prefer using shortcuts anyway. If you prefer using the old toolbar way of doing things you could easily expand "Toolbox" and go about your business.

Again, the UI I imagine is supposed to be as dynamic as possible, and make it a pleasure to work with. The current UI in Hammer is an absolute disaster and could easily be fixed.

[jimonions]

It would be nice if hammer let you detach screens to let you work on multiple monitors, as for everything else it really just seems needless to completely change it. UDK follows the same sort of layout, the only thing I really want is an asset browser window for hammer. Getting things into source takes twice as long as UDK.

That's just from an art creation viewpoint though. I actually far more enjoy source's additive bsp brush layout and entity setup. After 4 years of using hammer the only thing that really got in the way were compiling bugs and asset creation. A more interactive compiling interface would be much appreciated.
I currently don't use hammers default compiler for bigger compiles. I stuck with VIDE a while back and its absolutely amazing how much better it is both in performance and options.

The visgroups could also use a bit of a rework but not entirely sure how. More likely there just needs to be a better way to view what you're working with through all the clutter without using a cordon brush all the time.

so to sum up just 3 things:
drag and drop asset browser like UDK
Streamlined compiling window with more options
less cluttered wireframe views

[[Steve]]

It really would be nice to be able to work across multiple monitors/ have detachable windows.
If only hammer source was with the public sdk, most of these UI enhancement features wouldn't take much work to implement.

Its a shame the linux/osx sdk doesn't come with a hammer port, i can understand why. But a multiplatform hammer editor would be great.

I did consider experimenting with making a editor, it would be possible to write one as a tool like the material editor using the tool framework and thus keep it multiplaform. You could use mesh builder to render the vmf in engine but then it gets complicated because rendering the vmf over the bsp wouldn't be that useful.

I guess what would probably be best would be to render the vmf in a separate viewport adjacent to the in-game view (as editing of the brushwork in the vmf view would be possible but obviously wouldn't update in in-game view) but this would also be kind of redundant.

The main issue is compiling, it would still have to be external. and because of such i think i concluded there wouldn't be any real gains from a in-engine vmf editor.
However a in-engine entity editor would be useful as you could do something similar to foundry and save and sync ent changes back to the vmf and the bsp.

So basically it would be useful if Valve just fix/finish foundry imo, but that will never happen now that they are working with source2.

Also that damn sdk launcher ! i wish that could be moved onto a second monitor, its Vgui causing it i think... cant remember off the top of my head if the model browser in hammer can move to a second screen.

[pk_hunter]

Check out the latest changelist for Sledge. A lot of your ideas got implemented!

New release is out! This release has some nice additions made by users Mozartkugeln and MaxED, so a big thanks to both of them for helping make Sledge better!

Got lots of features here:

Major features

- New Arch brush feature: smooth ramps


- Added experimental 3D rotation widget (currently only available during rotation mode)



- Render entity text in the 2D views (when zoom level >= 1)
- Entity angles are now shown in 2D viewports (when zoom level >= 0.5)



- Viewport window grid layout editor




- Support for multiple viewport windows (multi-monitor support)



- Add feature to capture a screenshot of a viewport. Fixes #149, fixes #97.


- Added favourite textures in the texture browser. Fixes #14.



Minor features

- Null textures are not tested during selection when they are hidden. Fixes #147.
- Set the bounding box of model entities to the size of their display model. Fixes #148.
- Clip tool now cycles between which side of the clip to keep. Fixes #48.
- VM tool now cycles between which types of points to show. Fixes #128.
- Double-clicking a texture in the texture application form will apply it
- Added a setting for rendering the selection box with dashed lines
- Added a setting for requiring a mouse click to move the camera when space is down
- Allow for decimal precision in numeric brush script controls. Fixes #127.
- Add an option to allow users to toggle rounding of created brush vertices. Fixes #131.
- Add missing hotkeys for carve and hollow. Fixes #132.
- Added axis text to the 2D viewport labels
- New 16px icon set
- Lots of other minor features

Bug fixes

- Fixed a text rendering crash on older graphics cards
- Fix for rendering issues on old ATI cards
- Make "center views on selection" work when nothing is selected. Fixes #134.
- Update the merging and vertex grouping logic in the VM tool. Fixes #139, fixes #140.
- Ignore clicking in the 3D view when space is held down to control the camera. Fixes #135.
- Fix error in the grouping actions. Fixes #130.
- Fix several issues on the texture application form.
- 3D camera can now be moved up/down using Q/E keys.
- Arrow keys can now be used to move the viewport camera in the 2D views
- Lots of small performance optimisations

[LordDz]

This shit is becoming better and better. I like.

[plagueofburia]

This seems really interesting I appreciate all the work put into this. This is cool it looks like hammer

What major differences has sledge got to Hammer?

I think I read the map cannot have displacements is this correct?

Has sledge more advance features than Hammer?

I guess Hammer needs a blacksmith to fix the hammer.

Can one do the camera skew trick to align textures using the camera?

It would be awesome if one could skew a texture not having to go through the complex procedure of aligning the texture on a slope.(Though I am grateful hammer can do that) Texture alignment on slopes to be more simple I mean.

I guess sledge still working with diffuse textures not PBR materials?

[Armageddon]

It's pretty much a 1:1 Hammer recreation with a few bells and whistles on top of it. There's no displacements because it only works for GoldSrc at the moment. Why would Sledge have physically based shading???

[plagueofburia]

A...I don't know perhaps because everything will eventually veer towards PBR in these mapping programs. As this is an open source program, I think my question had validity. I wanted to have the clear distinction between the two. I do know now that source has it sets of shaders and more advance engine like UDK has its source of shaders that incorporate PBR.

[pk_hunter]

It's pretty much a 1:1 Hammer recreation with a few bells and whistles on top of it. There's no displacements because it only works for GoldSrc at the moment. Why would Sledge have physically based shading???

Although rather excitingly for those of us still developing for GS (read: me) - once displacements are implemented into Sledge, they will work for both Goldsource and Source. Epic.

[MrTwoVideoCards]

A...I don't know perhaps because everything will eventually veer towards PBR in these mapping programs. As this is an open source program, I think my question had validity. I wanted to have the clear distinction between the two. I do know now that source has it sets of shaders and more advance engine like UDK has its source of shaders that incorporate PBR.

PBR is not supported by source, at all.

[YokaI]

Awesome. I may help code for Linux support. I'll check out the documentation later today.

I was looking into making a Linux alternative for Hammer anyway, so this is great news for me.

edit: Just poked around the source code, seems promising. Unfortunately the Github readme doesn't have a good task list or roadmap. Anybody know if the project has something along these lines? Would help for newcomers to help integrate the next feature etc etc.

[TKAzA]

Is this anything like?
http://www.moddb.com/news/jackhammer-ne ... blic-alpha

How do they compare?

[YokaI]

Is this anything like?
http://www.moddb.com/news/jackhammer-ne ... blic-alpha

How do they compare?

They're very similar, but Sledge is open source (which can either be a good or bad thing, depending on the person.) Jackhammer seems to support more platforms currently, but having looked at Sledge's source code, it really wouldn't be too hard to implement support for other platforms (Unlike some open source projects, looking at you Open Broadcast Software!) Sledge, in some ways, seems more promising to me at the moment.

Having messed around a bit with it, it's cool, but I'd like to wait until Source is supported. Also, compilation for Valve's games on Linux / MacOSX would probably be difficult because you would have to backwards-engineer vBSP / vRAD / vVIS. It's still an awesome project though!

[Xyos212]

Valve needs to really get with the times. get rid of the orthagraphic views and focus on a single 3d window for editing. More focus and options need to be added to model support and brushwork needs to go the way of the dodo...