making maps without hammer

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martijntje

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Aug 2, 2009
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browsing through the archive to find what the last contests theme's have been I stumbled upon the notepad contest. I found it to be quite interesting.

Has anybody ever tried to write a program the lets you easily edit maps or generates maps.

I'm asking because I am seriously thinking of writing one.

EDIT:
hold on everyone, I do not want to replace hammer, I am not that nuts. I was more thinking of generating small and simple pieces of map.

for example, a program that takes a picture as an imput then outputs a vmf with a displacement in it where the brightness of each pixel is translated in the height of the displacement. aka you can now create displacements in photoshop.

things like that
 
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Nutomic

L11: Posh Member
Feb 7, 2009
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I highly doubt you will be able to do anything that even gets you close to what hammer can, no chance making it better.

But there are actually some custom editors, i think one was posted at interlopers which could only edit brushes, but still.
 

Dr. ROCKZO

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Jul 25, 2009
580
159
I'd rather have full hammer control over something that doesn't crash. Saving often is your friend.
 

martijntje

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Aug 2, 2009
539
334
hold on everyone, I do not want to replace hammer, I am not that nuts. I was more thinking of generating small and simple pieces of map.

for example, a program that takes a picture as an imput then outputs a vmf with a displacement in it where the brightness of each pixel is translated in the height of the displacement. aka you can now create displacements in photoshop.

things like that
 

J4CK8

L11: Posh Member
Mar 4, 2009
820
243
Twister can only make displacements though? It would be cool to have a 'portable' version of hammer where you wouldn't need to be connected to the internet to run it.
 

Nutomic

L11: Posh Member
Feb 7, 2009
888
177
Twister can only make displacements though? It would be cool to have a 'portable' version of hammer where you wouldn't need to be connected to the internet to run it.

Totally for it.

But this would still require a shitload of work, and you would need all textures, models and so on.
 

martijntje

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Aug 2, 2009
539
334
Totally for it.

But this would still require a shitload of work, and you would need all textures, models and so on.
maybe, if I make use of crafty and only limit myself to rectangular world brushes it might not even be that hard.

so I have been playing around and I made a program that made a map with a sphere made of a thousand enities. (entities are easier than brushes)
oif1p0.png

that is a screenshot of hammers 3d view
 

Penguin

Clinically Diagnosed with Small Mapper's Syndrome
aa
May 21, 2009
2,039
1,484
Real men map with Notepad.
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
aa
Jul 31, 2009
1,590
410
If you just want Hammer-but-better, running Steam in offline mode and using VBCT for compiles gets you a long way.

The VMF format is pretty easy to get a handle on, because you can more-or-less just look at it to figure out how it works. Actually building something to handle it... you need to decide if you want to write your own parser or some some of Valve's code available in the SDK.
 

Fraz

Blu Hatte, Greyscale Backdrop.
aa
Dec 28, 2008
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If we hound Valve enough to make a portable version of hammer, where you don't need to be signed in to steam even (ie, you point it in the way of the gcfs, and such for the game you want to map for) Would be win. Yeknow? for those long journeys with a laptop >.>
 

J4CK8

L11: Posh Member
Mar 4, 2009
820
243
If we hound Valve enough to make a portable version of hammer, where you don't need to be signed in to steam even (ie, you point it in the way of the gcfs, and such for the game you want to map for) Would be win. Yeknow? for those long journeys with a laptop >.>

Precisly what I said :D Though an actual portable version, ie. for a DS, would be very epic though I doubt that would be very possible.