Your "Ahhhh...NOW I get it!" Moments

[iiboharz]

iibo told me that you can use -hijack in your compile settings to automatically reload the map if TF2 is already running.

That was wormatty but still, yeah that was a really good one.

I guess some big ones for me were figuring out how hints can be used effectively.

Another was probably when I figured out how you could create shapes that would typically be invalid by using multiple triangular brushes.

 

[Zed]

Can a mod please fix the title? It's making me uncomfortable.

 

[Vincent]

Oh just recalled another one.

The origin of the map will cut vvis along the major teal axis lines. So I tend to build my maps in one of the quadrants, generally the top right one (when looking in the top view).

 

[Moonfixer]

For me it is when I learned that a skybox was all I needed to seal a map instead of another box of brushwork out side of that.

 

[worMatty]

Oh just recalled another one.

The origin of the map will cut vvis along the major teal axis lines. So I tend to build my maps in one of the quadrants, generally the top right one (when looking in the top view).

The dark red lines on the Hammer grid are also places where VBSP will chop up your map. It's unavoidable without hacking VBSP so it may as well be safely ignored. It's doing us a favour, really, but I think it is probably more useful in HL2 single player maps where there are more large open environments.

Sometimes these 512 chop lines seem to cause messy visleaves. Other times they actually seem to do a great job of stopping them reaching other visleaves. If you find the portals that VBSP has created for you a bit excessive, you can attempt to clean them up by containing them within a set of 512x512x512 hint-textured cubes that share edges with the red and green lines. Sometimes this will help! Though it won't lead to any render performance gain so it's probably not worth the effort. But I find it interesting so I thought I'd show you some example images from when I experimented with them in a Deathrun easter egg area!

This is an extreme example but it demonstrates what I mean very well :-D

Without:

With (the hint grid was disabled in this image to make the portals easier to see):

A pointless thing to do, really, but an interesting observation. The edges of these hint cubes match up exactly with the red and green grid lines, but they affect the portals.

 

[Pocket]

The Alt-right-click trick for aligning textures. Before I found out about it, I actually made a special "alignment guide" texture that looked like a pattern of multicolored diamonds so I could make sure faces lined up correctly and then switch to the texture I actually wanted to use.

On a related note, the Fit button in the texture window. Great for things like making cylinders with textures that wrap perfectly all the way around. I should write a full guide on how to use it some time.

The Ctrl-F trick in vertex editing (select any two corners or midpoints on a face and hit Ctrl-F and it will slice the face, good for cases where the regular slice tool wouldn't work)

Using brushes as a guide for displacements, for when you need to use displacements to replicate a regular but complex geometric figure (like the Hydro dish, or a cooling tower on a nuclear plant)

 

[Lain]

While applying textures, you can hit Z to lock your mouse to control the camera so you don't have to awkwardly move the camera and then deselect the apply textures tool.

The Vertex tool is the work of some omnipresent hammer god. Use it.

Cordon tool is brilliant for iterating quickly on just one area without having to recompile the whole map.

Bulletblock is much better at handling splash damage than Clip.

When making skyboxes, you can just toggle skybox off and make the skybox in full-scale and then select it all and scale it with transform to 0.0625.

Keeping as close to a high grid size as you can will help enormously when it comes time to iterate/detail (Learned this from making CP_Banana_72)

When trying to make a new version, do not rush it. Play your map several times in a game to see what the problems are, this will help you learn to make better changes with feedback. (Learned this through CP_Ridgeline)

 

[Waffe]

I can remember three of these occasions from the top of my head:

- Read about func_details for the first time
- Learning to use the Visgroups (especially useful when optimizing)
- Thinking "H" was some sort of quick delete, but then noticing how everything popped up after restarting Hammer that it's in fact a Quick Hide hotkey. I also learned the usefulness of Ctrl + H to temporarily hide all the distracting stuff in the 2D views.

 

[YM]

The Alt-right-click trick for aligning textures. Before I found out about it, I actually made a special "alignment guide" texture that looked like a pattern of multicolored diamonds so I could make sure faces lined up correctly and then switch to the texture I actually wanted to use.

I did this too. Furnace Creek was beautiful.

 

[CriminalBunny]

My "Ahhhh...NOW I get it!" Moments:

- When I learnt that leaks could make the map not compile properly. I used to worry whenever a big chunk of the map didn't appear in the game.
- When I learnt to spot leaks with 'load point file'
- The 'align texture' shortcut with Alt + Right click
- When you told me full bright is bad. (My overlays showed up in complete shadow because I didn't put any lighting. I made a thread here asking how to fix it :I )

 

[Kube]

I've just learned to use alt+e to align the "Face Normal" option for editing displacement geometry, and it's already saving me time.

Edit: Sorry, alt+M2

Edit edit: Also, assigning multiple faces to an overlay. I used to make individual overlays for each face I wanted a single sign on.

 

[OBV10U3_NINJA]

Just fixed a devastating lighting bug that kept crashing my map. Turned down the light map resolution.

 

[Tumby]

[Stuff about how visleafs are automaticaly cut along dark red lines]

IMPORTANT CORRECTION:
This only applies to the top view.