Everything Else > Map making?

Dirty Dan

L1: Registered
Sep 5, 2012
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0
Valve seems to be commercializing everything they have in their utility belt. And adding a few more goodies for the rest of us with no experience in this sort of thing.

With the release of replays, source film-maker, saxxies. You can tell that Valve sees a lot of potential in directing and youtube.

Not to mention community content such as models. The workshop, and so forth.

But when will the golden age of mapping start? All we got so far was a limited Portal 2 map maker! And hammer is still an outdated and not to mention very buggy mapping program.

Perhaps Valve will take a second look at Source SDK, and see the potential in great maps, if only they upgraded the software.

But if they DID upgrade the hammer editor, what would you like to see in it?

I personally would love an upgraded carve tool, or an automatic building decorator.
 

Trotim

aa
Jul 14, 2009
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Eh. The competitive scene isn't exactly getting a lot of attention either. At least there's Map Stamps right?
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
Hammer is getting improvements.. they just don't backport features to older releases and TF2's hammer is several years old now.

The Hammer that comes with SFM has a bunch of improved features. Saved cordones, does a better job dealing with corrupt vmf's, and the compile log actually updates in real time.. even if you alt+tab away.

(just don't save any TF2 vmf with it or you'll break opening it in TF2 hammer and have to do a bunch of work recovering from it)
 

Micnax

Back from the dead (again)
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Apr 25, 2009
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I personally would love an upgraded carve tool

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But anyway, I'd love to see it get a full-on upgrade much like UDK, with real-time changes and such. Of course, that's just a fantasy of mine.
 

henke37

aa
Sep 23, 2011
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I wish they'd just license the ABS pack already. It's free stuff and unlike their developers, he actually checks that the fgd file matches what works in the engine.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
I thought most people were aware that they're making a whole new set of SDK tools. Why are people not aware of this?
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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I thought most people were aware that they're making a whole new set of SDK tools. Why are people not aware of this?

They're also "making" the next Half-Life game. Doesn't mean it'll ever see the light of day.
 

Jeremy

L11: Posh Member
Oct 24, 2010
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I thought most people were aware that they're making a whole new set of SDK tools. Why are people not aware of this?
Where did you hear about that?
 

YM

LVL100 YM
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Dec 5, 2007
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They said it in a bunch of interviews about a year ago. They said at the time the SDK team was the single biggest team in the company.
 

Yacan1

D I G I T A L I N F L U E N C E R
aa
Nov 7, 2010
411
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I suppose the priorities of valve are shifting. Although, everyone is doing what they want so I guess they come together when they have to. Maybe at the conceptual stage of a game, they aren't focused on building it straight away, sort of like sketching a map before you block it out. Odds are, if it comes out, it'll be buggy as all hell. Or I'm just insane.
 

Mr. Happy

L6: Sharp Member
Jul 16, 2008
320
158
There's no reason to believe they aren't working on new tools, and as Aly says they are.
There's no reason to believe that any new tools will work with TF2.

However there are some improvements they could easily make. Simple things that would help alot and stuff they already have that would be helpful if they released. A couple people spending a little time. It would be nice if they treated the tools like they treat their games. Their games have sequels but also updates, bugfixes, new content, patches and improvements big and small. Even HL1 gets updated regularly.

If they could backport Portal2/SFM Hammer to TF2 and add some instancing features for TF2 (like material replacement sets and displacement offset fixing) that would be really nice.

What TF2 Hammer is missing is really just instancing stuff, allowing nested instances and fixing the _parms system would be extraordinarily helpful. That and the major bugs, but that stuff seems to be getting fixed. Anyone else notice Hammer is less crashy since the recent updates?

As for monetizing maps, that's an incredibly hard problem to figure out how to do right without breaking the community.

Don't they support competitive? If they don't they should. They blog/news about it, create and maintain competitive oriented cvars (stopwatch, highlander), and release medals/badges...
 

Idolon

they/them
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Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
It's not a matter of TF2's Hammer being outdated; it's a problem of Hammer not having a major overhaul since, like, 1998. Compare it to any modern development tools like UDK and it really shows.
 

Trotim

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Jul 14, 2009
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Don't they support competitive? If they don't they should. They blog/news about it, create and maintain competitive oriented cvars (stopwatch, highlander), and release medals/badges...

You make it sound like they do more than that. They really don't. Yeah they put in random little cosmetic medals and put announcements they are told to put on their blog by league admins on their blog sometimes but that's it. Stopwatch and Highlander were literally added like 3 years ago. Meanwhile the spectator HUD is still awful for any kind of commentating
 

Mr. Happy

L6: Sharp Member
Jul 16, 2008
320
158
See there ya go, tell them what they should do (like improve spectator hud). I didn't realize highlander was that old, but I do know that I've seen in changelogs valve fixing bugs with it.

What SHOULD they be doing?


----

Hammer could do with lots of updates for sure, the workflow does have issues big and small but the biggest differences between it and UDK are engine differences.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Hammer could do with lots of updates for sure, the workflow does have issues big and small but the biggest differences between it and UDK are engine differences.
Exactly. Unreal, I think, uses deferred lighting exclusively, so of course it's able to light its in-development environments in real time. Whether that counts as progress or just an unnecessary burden on players' systems is open for debate.