Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Dear fellow lopers ,

Working with the Source engine is often really tedious. We find ourselfs in 2010; Where automation, robots and Apple **** have taken over the world. One would expect a company that promises its full dedication towards the modding community to adopt simple functions that'll improve the workflow. Sure, The engine itself still stands strong amongst visual heavyweights such as the cryengine and the UnrealEngine but the workflow is lacking A LOT in my opinion. No matter who I ask, they all agree on one thing: It is pre y2k, time consuming and makes us want to kill kittens. The average person would classify making maps as tedious itself but this is getting rather annoying. There are so many things in Hammer where i think 'this could have been better or worked faster'. So i have decided to come up with a list of anoying little things that could have been easily fixed. It gives me the impression they don't want to make the SDK better. At the moment Valve left us with a half working 4 year old (updated) engine and a non functional editor based on workcycles from 10years ago.

-Materials (vmt's) need to be hand edited. Sure you have programs like Ducttape ( thx coder ) and VTFedit but thats not the point. It's not a good workflow. Also, when you import textures you have to re-open the editor. And all these VTF compressions, its really confusing.
- Lack of a proper texture tool. You have to hold CTRL to select all the faces you want to select and if you by accident fail to hold CTRL you have to start all over because CTRL-Z will make the texture tool bug.
- When placing in models, You first have to make a prop_static and after that specify a model. This works pretty slow, as i'd like to drag it from the model browser.
- Working with models - editing qc. files is tedious
- The lack of a realtime faceposer within hammer
- The lack of a good link between all programs
- Hammer compile almost locks up your system

I love Source while it feels uncomfortable to work with. Hammer is a great program but it can be even greater. I was wondering what your opinions were.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... e_Requests

Already been done.

Exactly

A replacement for the BSP system would be brilliant. With that you could kiss compiling goodbye and maybe, just maybe, say hello to WYSIWYG editing where you can jump straight in and test your level (a la CryEngine 2 for example). We can only hope that Valve will use a true next-gen version of Source for Ep3, because I can't see them developing a brand new engine for Ep2 and the like.

I totally agree that the workflow is tedious, and Hammer is quite the broken piece of software in some respects. I especially dislike the terrain/displacement tools.

I dont think its the BSP system what needs to be updated. Its just the workflow like you guys said what makes Hammer feel uncomfortable. For example when i change my lightning i would be perfect with having a realtime preview like Spark has. But I dont think Valve is gonna implement those things. They made enough money with source to start developing a new shiny engine which i guess theyre doing right at the moment. With a better workflow ofc

I just wish that they could have added some more buttons to the right panel bar, like a things that atumaticly opens a prop_static/physic dialog or an info_player_start placer. So that it may not appear in the big list of entitys. But overall I have allways like hammer, so many things you can do buy using the i/o system and such

Compiling models is a slow, painful process. Heck it took me an hour to set up the files to replace the Scout in TF2 and it didn't work properly in the end XD

software development kitting for the source engine is out-dated I love the thread title.

But of course, you're absolutely right. Having to open up notepad every time we make a material should be a crime in this day and age. And you're right about the way you place models.

But in all honesty, I've gotten so used to these things that I don't even give a damn anymore.

skoften wrote:... Also, when you import textures you have to re-open the editor...

Do you? I've never had to do this when importing textures while the editor is open. Models yes, but textures no. Even alterations to the VMT or VTF show up immediately for me.

I was sad last time I opened Hammer, after messing around with CryEngine's Sandbox. Hell, Source overall needs updated.

I love how Sandbox is all real-time and it takes less then a second to play what you just created. Lighting is awesome as you can move light entities in real time and such.

SDK could be streamlined hugely; get it all into one program and keep it simple.

UDK is a complicated behemoth and still just too awkward for me to use.

Hammer has excellent features and so does the FacePoser; but they need combining and it needs live alteration updates. And a damn lighting preview. That's all.

Gary wrote:I was sad last time I opened Hammer, after messing around with CryEngine's Sandbox. Hell, Source overall needs updated.

I love how Sandbox is all real-time and it takes less then a second to play what you just created. Lighting is awesome as you can move light entities in real time and such.

I don't know how fair the lighting comparison is, source doesn't use direct dynamic lighting like UE. Lighting is simulated, then baked in source, so asking for a realtime preview would be asking for the rad to recompile every time you moved a light. And I would shit a million bricks if source decided to take UE's lighting approach (in a bad way).

Of course UE has lightmass which performs similarly to Vrad, but you'll notice that it doesn't have realtime preview either

Going to have to agree with stoop's first post too used to it to give a damn. Although I do want lightmapping on models.

Sure the sdk could be better, but before you go off on how you want "real time lighting" and such just remember people like me.
my computer is very, very outdated it barely plays ep2 at low settings and lags at the simplist particle effects, just last night hl2 decided to play in fullbright... thats HALF LIFE 2 for fucks sake! and don't even think about any new valve games like l4d or l4d2, I can't even PLAY those. In fact the sdk is one of the only valve products that, untill recently, has worked like a charm (in comparison). so all I ask is that they fix the current bug in the ep2 engine., and then LEAVE IT ALONE! everytime they update it causes hammer to crash for a few weeks. I would much prefer they make a new SDK rather then update the old one to a status that my Hamster-powered computer can't run.

skoften wrote:- Lack of a proper texture tool. You have to hold CTRL to select all the faces you want to select and if you by accident fail to hold CTRL you have to start all over because CTRL-Z will make the texture tool bug.

Right click my man.