Problem with hammer.

[nightwatch]

Can we get text of said email?

This is embarrassing, but I find that my life revolves around hammer recently and I'm going into withdrawal.

 

[tyler]

It is nothing of interest or value. Effectively "This is describing the same bug as before but in a different environment. Why would this be happening?"

 

[static2601]

You'll all be pleased to know I emailed the TF team and Tony Paloma CCed me on his own email to the rest of the team. They seem to be aware of the issue and are working on it. No ETA given.

Thanks, I am desperately waiting for the fix as everyone else is. Ugh i Cant stand not being able to map when i have the most time to.

 

[static2601]

Can we get text of said email?

This is embarrassing, but I find that my life revolves around hammer recently and I'm going into withdrawal.

I didn't know how much i relied on hammer til i started shaking and getting angry at nothing.

 

[Bloodhound]

There is an alternative, but I didn't tested it by myself.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Microbrush_2

Demonstration Video

 

[Ravidge]

and if you guys didn't know, there's also this weird crash with custom overlays and sv_pure 2. it makes testing maps on our server quite irritating http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5181650/crashreport.pdf

TF2M server has been sv_pure 1 for a year now.

Last time I enabled sv_pure 2 was for a a couple of days during last years Halloween.

 

[fubarFX]

depends on the whitelist I guess

 

[Ravidge]

There is nothing in the whitelist referring to overlays or decals.
sv_pure doesn't even crash people. it won't even kick people unless specifically told to do so, on sv_pure 2 only, and then you get a very clear kick message stating the reason. The default behavior is just to force the GCF files over custom files when both are present for a specific texture/model/thing. It doesn't even look for, or care about custom files with unique (custom) names that doesn't actually replace anything.

 

[DeltaDog]

it bothers me that i nearly completed my map and then this comes and im like...awesome now i can make my map haunted......yeh...hammer just let go of all things i added to the map...this is bull. Vavle need to work on this bug.

 

[Yacan1]

Learn to model!

Hah. no.

 

[fubarFX]

I never said the crash made sense, all I know is I can consistently replicate the crash on sv_pure only

 

[tyler]

There is nothing in the whitelist referring to overlays or decals.
sv_pure doesn't even crash people. it won't even kick people unless specifically told to do so, on sv_pure 2 only, and then you get a very clear kick message stating the reason. The default behavior is just to force the GCF files over custom files when both are present for a specific texture/model/thing. It doesn't even look for, or care about custom files with unique (custom) names that doesn't actually replace anything.

Yeah, Ravidge, this was basically my process when Fubar told me what he thought was going on. But then I was able to replicate it. Something about sv_pure is screwed up because it is not working as expected.

 

[Pocket]

Hammer has got to be one of the most used, long-running programs that has never ever been stable and near-always featuring critical bugs that make no sense.
People just put up with it, it's just "hammer doing its thing, again".

In other cases, there's always 1 dude (or a team of dudes) who gets so sick of it they eventually make their own replacement for the program, which somehow hasn't happened yet with Hammer, I am quite surprised.

In fairness, maybe half the bugs (such as this one) happen because of a change to the engine, not Hammer itself, so any homebrewed alternative would be experiencing the same issues.

 

[nightwatch]

Has anyone tried compiling and running a messed up vmt? I've been editing my maps with a text editor for the last while but it takes a lot of time and constant compiling and checking.

 

[Muffin7]

I don't know if anyone has tried this yet, but it seems if you have SFM installed and you go to steamapps/<username>/common/SourceFilmmaker/game/bin and run the hammer.exe in there, it opens maps completely fine (but I haven't tried compiling any yet)

 

[tyler]

The SFM Hammer will break your VMF by making it unplayable in TF2 and unreadable by old Hammer. I don't advise using it.

 

[Muffin7]

Oh well, it was worth a shot. I've been digging around a little and I've found that if you create a shortcut to hammer.exe in sourcesdk/bin/orangebox/bin and add -dxlevel 80 to it, it seems to work.. Again, I don't know what kind of problems this might cause to your .vmf or whatever, but it's seemingly loading the 2D views and compiling fine.

 

[Sergis]

Oh well, it was worth a shot. I've been digging around a little and I've found that if you create a shortcut to hammer.exe in sourcesdk/bin/orangebox/bin and add -dxlevel 80 to it, it seems to work.. Again, I don't know what kind of problems this might cause to your .vmf or whatever, but it's seemingly loading the 2D views and compiling fine.

seems to work so far

except my displacement alphas are inverted

edit: seems to crash bit too fast to be useful

 

[froggie]

seems to work so far

except my displacement alphas are inverted

edit: seems to crash bit too fast to be useful

I can confirm this. Hammer seems to load just fine. Models&Tools are working.
Alphas are inverted and the models in the 2dviews seem to be have a material problem. Vbsp crashes on compile though.

BUT

When you done editing with the shortcut hammer and save your vmf ( I suggest picking a new name, just in case)
and then load the file in the messed up hammer from the sdk and compile from there everything seems to work just fine. Even alphas are back to normal

 

[Untouch]

Oh well, it was worth a shot. I've been digging around a little and I've found that if you create a shortcut to hammer.exe in sourcesdk/bin/orangebox/bin and add -dxlevel 80 to it, it seems to work.. Again, I don't know what kind of problems this might cause to your .vmf or whatever, but it's seemingly loading the 2D views and compiling fine.

That's working, I'll add this to the OP.

EDIT: I mean, it would be working if it wasn't crashing every 2 seconds.