3 Most wanted features for hammer

[Dead Plant]

Hammer is officially almost 20 years old at this point, and as everyone who's made a map knows- it most certainly shows its age.
Even though it's incredibly unlikely we will ever get an updated hammer that supports Team Fortress 2, I am still going to list off everything that I'd like to see in this program.

1: Bug fixes/crash support
It's a quite common occurrence for Hammer to crash. There are hundreds of bugs, ranging from slight visual glitches to map-breaking progress-halting errors. Even something as small as a patch would help. Please Valve, I've had at least two maps corrupted by now...

2: Scaling models
This is just something that most other versions of hammer support by now, and it's generally a cool feature. But for Team Fortress 2? No, that's way too complicated. Can't have it.

3: Better compiler
Not that there's really anything wrong with it, but if I want to pack my map and export it, I have to use a third-party compiler like compilepal. Adding a publish/pack compiler would just streamline the process.

That's all I could think of for now, but if you've got any ideas feel free to comment them.

 

[Da Spud Lord]

The only change I really want is for the compiler to run on a separate thread so that I can continue to interact with Hammer and TF2 while doing a compile.

 

[Nixon]

General UI improvements would be nice, importing textures and models should be easier.
Maybe a grab tool for displacements, functional level 4 displacements

 

[[Rx.] Christian Troy]

The ability to actually handle big work loads.

Ever notice when you select "Map Properties" in the drop down menu that you can edit things there but if you do that for a few minutes, it will crash Hammer? Say you only edit one thing, close it, and go back to mapping. In that case it doesn't crash but what ever you do after that has an 80% chance of crashing Hammer no matter how simple it is. Then of course after all this time Hammer has been around for TF2... it still has problems with more than two maps being opened. Because of that limitation opening and closing too many maps while yours is still open will cause problems. Got an area that needs to be pasted in from another .vmf? Maybe you need to move an area in your map somewhere and like always, it needs some tweaking to fit correctly. Might want to find that sweet spot fast because you are about to crash Hammer.

I also agree with everything previously posted especially this one...

2: Scaling models
This is just something that most other versions of hammer support by now, and it's generally a cool feature. But for Team Fortress 2? No, that's way too complicated. Can't have it.

I can't even begin to count how many times I needed this! Ever find an HL2 prop that is perfect for what you need only to find out that it's half the size you need it be? Want a much cooler looking skybox? Like ya said... we can't have that!

 

[Idolon]

triangular displacements

 

[FloofCollie]

I'd find Hammer easier to use if it were the Doombuilder/Unreal style of building levels (drawing or carving out space instead of using brushes) but that's just a far-out idea. Presumably if it were ever to be conceived, levels constructed in that format could still be converted to .bsp files.

 

[Spipper]

Better displacement tools, in general, would be pretty cool. Would love to be able to select multiple specific vertices/edges/triangles, select edge loops/rings, and all that jazz.

Another feature on my wishlist is CSG operations similar to those found in Kristian Duske's Trenchbroom level editor for Quake. Merging brushes is a lifesaver when you are trying to dodge that brush limit.

And don't forget about automatic face triangulation to avoid nasty invalid brushes! (again, another handy feature found in Trenchbroom)

 

[DrSquishy]

Having brush controls like with blender's meshes to push and pull vertices away from each other on a certain axis would save a lot of tedium - would also be good if invalid brushes were highlighted instead of only finding out once you clip them, etc

 

[TheMightyGerbil]

A fix to the bug where models flip incorrectly when I copy and flip a map half. I used to be able to do this all the time but no more. It makes keeping everything exactly mirrored extremely tedious.

 

[Scampi]

GTKradiant had a feature I loved, and that was brush merging. If the result wouldn't be concave, you could merge two brushes together with a single command.