joe_rogers_11155 wrote:1. Valve released Half Life 2 after a six-year development time to showcase the Source engine.
2. It has been six years since the previous Half-Life 2 episode.
3. Source 2 has been released.

[itshappening.gif intensifies]

Counter-Strike: Source was released to showcase the engine before HL2.

Gamescom soon fellow interlopers

I'm very happy you finally have some grid rotation control! That is something that the Source engine has been missing for EVER! There's gonna be some bad assed rotational geometry maps now.

Here's my signature from over 10 years ago talking about grid rotation in a different engine I used to work on:

This is pretty freaking exciting news! I plan to spend the weekend learning as much as I can about the new Hammer. Not crazy about dota but I plan to carry on mapping for a future FPS release. It will give me time to get my feet wet with mesh creation and material usage.

I've leached so much great information off of Interlopers in the past 8 years or so and I hope that this will again be the go to place for everything related to Valve level design. The dev wiki only takes you so far.

It already looks like there have been some huge leaps forward in Source 2. No more brush based levels and we can now build at a much more complex level using meshes. We no longer need to worry about sealing off the level and filling empty space with NoDraw brushes. Not sure what the future holds for hints/skips. I imagine we will still need to help the engine in some way to tell it what to render, but hopefully it is much more intuitive. I hope the main concerns for optimization are mostly polycounts.

It would be great to see some design challenges that focus on building basic structures in the new hammer editor, just dev textures to start. For instance, the first challenge could be to build a bridge as was demonstrated in one of the tutorials. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... _Editing_2
The goal would be to create a great looking bridge while keeping polycounts reasonable. Even if it were not a full blown challenge, it would still be fun for even a few of us to give it a shot and compare results. Seems like a great learning opportunity. Let me know what you think.

I suppose the real question is whether this stuff is backwards compatible. Can we save Source 2 maps with their new mesh types as VMFs? Will the newly compiled BSPs run in older stuff?

I would shit my pants with glee if so.

I seriously doubt it, but on the other hand, you can port source 1 maps into it d2_coast_01

apparently the anti-mage is a 9ft tall supermutant and the antlions are the creeps.

It seems like this is mostly dota 2 centered. no sky and only top down view. Is there any other functionality apart from taking a look at new shaders and mesh options?

What I mean is this editor looks built for dota 2. Is there anything else that can quite possibly be used for the presumed hl2 branch engine update.

Has anybody had any luck making conventional displacement geometry?

I get the tile editor is pretty sweet, but I can't for the life of me get the standard things like sewing, subdividing etc to come up at all. It just feels like they've stripped out large portions of the hammer tools that we've grown so accustomed to because they're entirely unnecessary for dota2.

first you make a quad or block and delete the unneeded sides, then you select the face, scroll down in the left menu add subdivision, then you go to the displace tool and you can manipulate it like displacements in source 1.

Yeah I got that far. Subdividing (smoothing out the corners of multiple displacement meshes) and sewing (fixing any gaps between different meshes) do not seem to exist any longer. Both are pretty critical components of displacement work.

smooth or clay do that pretty well, sewing can be do with merge meshes.

+ what used to be invalid brushes can now as meshes be subdivided and displaced.

I am sorta angry about valve dropping option to export maps to DXF files
they did put two new options to export them to OBJ and DMX, but OBJ does not work properly and DMX is pretty much Maya only at the moment

ever wondered how source2 would handle 5 million polygons? 10-15 fps
x4?
20 million polygons? 0-4 fps

these are values in engine? I remember torture testing ep2 with 1.5 million polygons and getting average 200fps, it went into a crawl when I turned on wireframe mode