What do you dislike about Hammer?

Forthex

L2: Junior Member
Aug 2, 2008
80
12
Why not give users the option to extract files out of the appropriate .gcf's so the Steam-less option can use and show textures/models/etc? Or is that illegal?
 

kwagner

L2: Junior Member
Feb 28, 2009
92
6
This option already exists
Texture scaling lock button looks like this: <-tl-> check it and the texture stays the same size in relation to the face of the brush :D

:woot: You mean... if I UN-check that, the texture scaling will stay put while I change the size of the brush?

omigod I would so not have lost hair last night if I'd known that!
 

What Is Schwa

L6: Sharp Member
Jan 13, 2008
375
445
Multi monitor support! Let me arrange the tools and views however I want them on either monitor.
 

l3eeron

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Jan 4, 2008
593
88
...there's smooth and noise option for displacements too already.
 

munkey

L1: Registered
Apr 4, 2009
12
0
Placing the lighting/compile times.

When you get a good-sized map going you can't tweak and test the lighting without waiting half an hour for it to compile.

Though there's not much that can be done about it I know, short of using 100% dynamic lights, which isn't practical yet even in more modern engines.
 

Earl

L6: Sharp Member
Dec 21, 2007
284
38
Thanks for all the input.

HLLib, which I will be using to interface with gcf's to extract textures, does not require steam to be running. You will have to have steam, tf2, and the SDK installed to use this, however.

In other news, I have basic visualization working. This is a very simple map I made in hammer really fast, loaded into my tool. There is no UI at this point, all you can do is fly around (wasd + mouse, like in hammer).

23v10r8.png
 

DucatiBon

L2: Junior Member
Jan 28, 2009
71
0
How hard would it be so displacement find the closest displacement to them and alter the vertexes to match then auto sew them
 

MangyCarface

Mapper
aa
Feb 26, 2008
1,626
1,325
One thing that really bugs me is that if you're selecting a ton of faces in face edit and screw something up, you have to reselect.
Making face selection a 'step' that can be undone/redone would help a lot.
Also, making world vs face alignment smarter would be nice.

Hope this works out!
 

Earl

L6: Sharp Member
Dec 21, 2007
284
38
Does it take advantage of mutli-core processors and GPU acceleration?

Hardware acceleration, yes (note the little OpenGL icon?), multi-core, no. Most tasks wont be that CPU intensive, anyway.

How hard would it be so displacement find the closest displacement to them and alter the vertexes to match then auto sew them

I'm thinking of adding something like this.

One thing that really bugs me is that if you're selecting a ton of faces in face edit and screw something up, you have to reselect.
Making face selection a 'step' that can be undone/redone would help a lot.
Also, making world vs face alignment smarter would be nice.

Hope this works out!

There will be a very robust undo/redo stack. I think you'll be able to toggle between selection events being undoable or not.
 

Darth Cyrax

L2: Junior Member
Nov 29, 2008
94
8
Simple-
Random crap that breaks your map.
I'm not talking about leaks- things like an overlay touching too many faces.
 

medd

L2: Junior Member
Feb 21, 2009
50
2
Is it possible to make it so you can group faces?
Sometimes you need to select certain displacement faces over and over and it can be a pain to have to reselect them all.
 

laghlagh

L6: Sharp Member
Jul 15, 2008
389
53
A way to easily create a smott corner with two connected displacements.
 

kwagner

L2: Junior Member
Feb 28, 2009
92
6
My current bugaboo is Hammer not applying a sprites extension automatically. I keep forgetting to put that in manually, and that's giving me fits.
 

SiniStarR

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Mar 31, 2009
585
116
having to press the camera button tool in order to change what camera you are viewing? Call me lazy if you want but would it not make sense to just let you change camera at anytime?
 

Forthex

L2: Junior Member
Aug 2, 2008
80
12
Could you add a better way to preview ropes? I hate how the line connecting move_rope and several keyframe_ropes doesn't show you at all a preview of how thick the rope will look.
 

Earl

L6: Sharp Member
Dec 21, 2007
284
38
Simple-
Random crap that breaks your map.
I'm not talking about leaks- things like an overlay touching too many faces.

Shouldn't be too hard to fix that, but won't be for a while.

Is it possible to make it so you can group faces?
Sometimes you need to select certain displacement faces over and over and it can be a pain to have to reselect them all.

Face groups aren't supported in the VMF format, so groups of faces would only last for as long as you have the map open in my tool. (unless I find a way to store it and not have hammer complain)

A way to easily create a smott corner with two connected displacements.

I assume you mean "smooth corner", and yes, that is one of my primary goals.

My current bugaboo is Hammer not applying a sprites extension automatically. I keep forgetting to put that in manually, and that's giving me fits.

Never used sprites, it will take me a while to get to this.

having to press the camera button tool in order to change what camera you are viewing? Call me lazy if you want but would it not make sense to just let you change camera at anytime?

This can be easily done, once i actually start working on the UI.

Could you add a better way to preview ropes? I hate how the line connecting move_rope and several keyframe_ropes doesn't show you at all a preview of how thick the rope will look.

Should be pretty easy. The only reason hammer shows ropes as red-green gradients is so you can see them in wireframe mode.


------------

I'm still working on loading in solids. It isn't easy to convert what a VMF stores and convert it to a bunch of connected vertices.
 

Brandished

L5: Dapper Member
Jan 19, 2008
234
311
Heh, I fully support this endeavor. After having messed around with Blender and DarkRadiant, I just don't have much motivation to work with Hammer anymore. Hammer is a nice tool, but I could easily list several hundred, possibly even several thousand, imporvements.

Anyways, to narrow things down, I'll just list my main problems with it:
  1. the enormous amount of instability using the texture browser causes, especially if search filters are used
  2. accidentally clicking another object or somewhere outside the selection when creating new brushes, trying to perform a translation on a brush / model, setting the cordon tool, using the face edit tool, or when in vertex editing mode
    [*]not being able to create arches / cylinders based on the view you're using and having to rotate / translate them after creation
  3. having to leave clipping mode to change which brushes are being clipped

There's also this thread that's been sitting on the Steam forums for several years now: What do you not like about level designing in hammer?

If you don't mind me asking, what are you developing this with? C? ++? .Net? Delphi? I was considering something like this myself before, but I just don't have anywhere near enough code knowledge to do so.

Also, if you haven't yet seen it, there's a bunch of nice resources on the VDC's programming site list as well.
 
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