What do you dislike about Hammer?

[Brandished]

Heh, completely forgot about this thread.

Argh, sorry for the MIA action. Things got really busy at work and it sucked up all my programming ennui. However, I do have an update:

Texture loading is working. Still a few kinks to work out (some missing textures, offsets are ignored for now), and I'd also like to get some rudimentary shading working, but it's there.

Next up on the list:
-Displacement parsing/rendering.
-Starting UI work

Looks good so far, I almost thought you had given up on this at first.

I dislike how it is extremely delicate and pretty hard to learn but also take note i am no computer whiz.

I agree with you on delicate, but I didn't find it too hard to learn, Hammer's mostly point, click,and drag. For me it was a bit intimidating at first (especially as I didn't have much prior experience with a 3D mapping or modeling program), but once I understood the basics, I picked it up quite quickly. The only hard part for me was figuring out lighting, not so much that it was difficult to understand, but mainly that I couldn't find any detailed resources on the light entity settings. I was stuck with mostly trial, error, and VMEX.

What did help me get started was going through several video tutorials:
There's a good list on the VDC
Several others can also be found on filefront

 

[Earl]

Another mini-update: I have texture loading completely working:

I've been working 6 day weeks for the past month so progress is slow...


I also realize one thing I have failed to address: Models. Hopefully I will be able to at least display them in my editor, but models are a-whole-nother can of worms...

 

[Yourself]

If there's one thing I hate about Hammer, it's that the clip tool doesn't let you define a clipping plane in 3D with 3 clipping points. It forces you to do it in 2D. Clipping off the corner of a cube is a major pain in the ass. This would be a rather trivial extension to the tool, so I hope to see it in this new editor eventually.

I'd actually be pleased if I found out that I was wrong and the Hammer clipping tool actually can clip along an arbitrary 3D plane.

 

[Acegikmo]

Great work so far!

A few things I have in mind:

• It would be nice to have an option to have the shaded polygon preview cast light on surfaces based on the light_environment value, so it looks more like it does in-game.
• Multiple cordon bounds would be great, and maybe a small toolbar to enable/disable your cordon cubes.
• Cubemap surface preview! If you can assign a color to a cubemap, I'd like an option to view all polygons in the color of the nearest cubemap. Useful to see which surface will be using what cubemap.
• 3D and 2D skybox preview.
  
  That's all for now I believe!
  And don't forget to make the textures load their alpha channel

 

[zornor]

Great work so far!

A few things I have in mind:

• It would be nice to have an option to have the shaded polygon preview cast light on surfaces based on the light_environment value, so it looks more like it does in-game.
• Multiple cordon bounds would be great, and maybe a small toolbar to enable/disable your cordon cubes.
• Cubemap surface preview! If you can assign a color to a cubemap, I'd like an option to view all polygons in the color of the nearest cubemap. Useful to see which surface will be using what cubemap.
• 3D and 2D skybox preview.

That's all for now I believe!
And don't forget to make the textures load their alpha channel

you might want to put that [/list] on there

 

[Earl]

Check it out, displacements:

Now I can start work on the actual UI. Very slow progress due to sparse free time.

 

[Engineer]

Looking good, keep working.

 

[Terr]

It looks nice. (I'd offer to help with a frontend but the only UI I ever did for a 3D tool was in Java :/ )

Just some features that I'd like to toss out (apologies if some have already been mentioned)... some of them might be possible in Hammer and I just haven't found out how yet.

Big item:

• Anything to aid in mirroring a map, when you want symmetric stuff. Some way to choose a center point (for rotational symmetry) or a center line (for reflective symmetry.) Perhaps overlay the other half of the map at 50% transparency? This kind of feature seems particularly possible for an external tool, if you can frequently use it to generate a "reversed copy" visgroup.

Lesser items:

• Vertex editing: Shrinking and moving a group of vertices. For instance, I have a larger octagonal pipe and a smaller octagonal pipe, and I want to have one narrow and merge into the other. If I slice off a bit of the larger one, can I transform the vertices on one half so that they all get closer to the center, creating a narrowing section?
• Saved presets for the cordon tool. Many times in 2D view I click trying to drag the selection area and I end up accidentally starting to draw a new, smaller rectangle.... and control-Z doesn't get my old selection back.

 

[Steff0o]

can you remove this bug?:

 

[Jimmy]

I hate the fact that you cant manipulate brushes in the 3D view. Im used to doing it in UT engine I also dont like the system of vertex manipulation as it is, and they should remove the clip tool

 

[YM]

I hate the fact that you cant manipulate brushes in the 3D view. Im used to doing it in UT engine I also dont like the system of vertex manipulation as it is, and they should remove the clip tool

Press x you nublet!!

now you can manipulate stuff in the 3D view. :thumbup1:

 

[Psy]

It's a bit crappy though because you can't control which axis you want to move objects along unlike pretty much every 3D program I've ever known that has an XYZ gizmo. :\

 

[TheNeverman]

I really hate the displacement modeling in Hammer - I want to freely grab a vert in the viewport and move into place rather than the forward/backward in one plane at a time. It should be more like a modeling package (max, maya, etc.)