Why do I have 2 different versions of Hammer? And I can't open my old maps with one of them.

Jabba

L1: Registered
Jan 10, 2016
18
2
Ok, bear with me here.

So last year I started building maps on Hammer. I added Hammer to the taskbar for easier access and always opened the editor through there.

Now I have a new laptop I'm mainly using and I installed sourceSDK to open Hammer and continue editing. For some strange reason though I couldn't pin Hammer to the taskbar, but thought nothing of it at first.

Now, I transferred all the necessary files from my PC to my laptop (vmf files, textures...) and tried opening a jump map I've been working on. Too my annoyance, but not too my surprise, Hammer failed to load the map and closed on itself.

So I continued editing the map on my PC instead. Now it's finished and I want to do a final compile before I upload it to the workshop. Problem is, my PC is so old and the map has quite a lot of entities (flying rockets, it's a pyro jump map), that the compiler crashes everytime I try to compile the map. It always freezes on 'Building Physics Colission Data' and then doesn't do anything anymore. I even waited several hours but nothing ever happened after the freeze.

Fine, I thought. I'll just transfer the .bsp file I had from earlier test compiles, put it on my laptop and convert it to .vfm and load it in. Again, Hammer crashed when I tried to open it.

Intrigued, I tried opening Hammer on my old PC through SourceSDK and to my surprise, it opened a different version of Hammer. Visually it's all the same, but I couldn't even open my map I had made on that same PC. So I have 2 different versions of Hammer now and only 1 can open the map I spent weeks working in and I can't compile it properly.

The errors I'm getting when opening the map in Hammer:

Failed to load the default scheme file. The map views may be missing some visual elements.

Followed by:

File C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\maps\jump_reflect_d.vmf, line 254251: unexpected end of file.

And then in crashes. Sometimes I also get an error about a 2fort groundlight model missing or a model.error missing.

Any ideas on how to fix this? I'm moving out in 2 days and not taking my PC with me (moving to the other side of the globe so yeah) and I really want to get this map online before I leave.
 

worMatty

Repacking Evangelist
aa
Jul 22, 2014
1,258
999
Don't use the Source SDK Hammer, it's outdated. Use the version of Hammer that comes with TF2. It's in Team Fortress 2/bin. Run hammer.bat once so it sets the correct VPROJECT environment variable and then use hammer.exe in future.

Avoid decompiling maps to re-use the resulting VMF when you have access to the source VMF. Decompiled VMFs may not be the same as the source VMF.

Don't store VMFs in tf/maps as you are likely to get write errors when you compile.

Tool recommendations for the future: Hammer++ and CompilePalX.
 

Jabba

L1: Registered
Jan 10, 2016
18
2
You're a lifesaver! I completely forgot I had to open the .exe from the tf2 bin file.