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:
- the enormous amount of instability using the texture browser causes, especially if search filters are used
- 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
- 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.