Forum posts

Just stopping by again to check progress and express my support and anticipation for a source engine version of this toolset. Keep up the great work!

Hey Archie, lopers is pretty quiet these days, all the good mappers went to mapcore.

Anyway I thought of another cool tool that I would love to have in Hammer, rotate multiple objects around their individual origins.

For example I have a bunch of square fence posts that I want to turn at a 45 degree angle, but the only option I have is to select each one and turn them individually, since when you select a bunch at once you can only rotate them all around the median point of the selection. A 'rotate around individual origins' tool or option would be ace.

It's been a few months since I last dropped in here. Is source supported yet?

Another idea. It would be nice to be able to view edge lengths in 3d views.

Had another idea for a selection option. Selecting things in hammer SUCKS fyi. No matter the process it takes FAR too long. Here's what I thunk:

When you select more than one entity in hammer you see a box enclosing all the things you have selected. Kinda like a bounding box for the current selection. I'd like a selection tool that selects everything inside that bounding box.

For instance, if I had a big long line of pipe models in my level that I need to put into a group I don't want to go through and click every single one. It would be cool if you could select the first and the last, and then hit a button to select everything within the selection bounding box you created.

Like this:

Here's another idea for you guys. A more dynamic grid. In blender the grid resizes as you scroll in and out. So if you have snap-to-grid active the selection will snap to the currently visible grid size. So zoomed right in you would move and snap to the smallest grid size automatically, and zoomed all the way out would automatically snap you to the largest grid size. I can do a video showing how it works in blender if you like.

Speaking of texture alignment, I haven't used it in sledge yet because I'm on source but I think more interactive texture manipulation would be awesome. Here's how I see it.

In texture mode, user hovers a face with the cursor and holds some key (shift?) to activate mouse manipulation of the texture. Scroll wheel scales the texture up and down. Hold MMB to pan the texture with the mouse up down left and right. Arrow keys nudge the texture by pixel. Texture snaps to the edges of the brush (ie: when an edge of the image is close to an edge of the brush it snaps but can be moved on the perpendicular axis).

I heard that sledge already has some good texturing features so maybe you already have something in place like this.

Is sledge going to have a more effective way of material checking? When I change a material source file and go back into hammer it shows the missing texture image on all faces that have the modified material applied. I'm sure every mapper has seen this while fiddling with materials. You have to close hammer and reopen it in order to have it load your updated texture properly.

Other editors 'listen' to files to catch changes and update in realtime, removing the need for closing and reopening hammer. Is this something Sledge can have?

Also having the brush face smoothing groups actually render in the editor would be very nice, and I don't think it's a hard shader to calculate right?

the whole concept of cubemaps has been broken since the steampipe update and there has been a bunch of ways to work around it. As far as I can tell the problem is that the compile tools (vbsp I think) puts in broken cubemaps when you compile your map. These are supposed to be default cubemaps so that you can preview the cubemap materials in your map with an arbitrary cubemap image, without having to run buildcubemaps every time. The problem is they just don't show. There are no cubemaps. Mappers need to go into their bsp using pakrat or VIDE and delete all the cubemap data, and then run buildcubemaps in engine again. But it's always problematic and never works consistenly.

Mappers need to run through one of many workaround solutions to get cubemaps working. It sucks.

I think this is a compile tools problem, and there are custom compile tools on the web that don't compile with the default cubemaps, to make the problem easier to solve, but it would be ideal to have a compile program that just loads in arbitrary cubemap images so we can see the values of our envmapped materials are ok without doing a bunch of crap.

Not sure how well I explained it here but those links should shed some light. If you can fix this you will be the source modding communities champion for years to come.

Hey guys, I'm from Interlopers and just wanted to stop by to offer some feedback on hammer. I have been modelling for source for ages now but only just really started mapping. Hammer is an abysmally inadequate tool, but I love what you are doing with sledge. As soon as you have source support ready I'll be making the jump. I haven't been able to make a hacky workaround yet but I was trying to get a map from hammer to sledge or vice versa, you might have seen some error reports come through.

I wanted to offer a little usability feedback. Can we have an option to open the Object Properties dialogue only on alt+enter? When I select multiple objects by clicking them, I click fast enough to trigger Sledges double click event and, mid select, the object properties dialogue opens up, almost always on top of the screen I am working in. It infuriates me in hammer because it chokes your production rate by putting a ceiling on your click speed. I have to select everything slowly in order to not trigger that damn Object Properties dialogue. Perhaps an alternative would be to have the dialogue only pop up if you double click the same object, rather than allowing the first click to be on one prop and the second click on another.

Also can you make the esc button smarter on the dialogue? When the user is inputting data into a field, esc should cancel out of it, enter should confirm. When no field is in use, enter should confirm the changes made, esc should cancel out of the properties dialogue AND CLOSE THE DIALOGUE. I get irrationably angry at hammer because when I instinctually hit esc it just unselects everything I have spent too much time already selecting, and I am left with the big, blank, intrusive Object Properties dialogue. Curse that thing all the way to the depths of hell.

Also when the user is in flythrough mode on the 3d viewport and the Object Properties dialogue opens up (almost always by mistake), can you cancel them out of flythrough mode? I have been in sledge a few times now and the OP dialogue will open up over the 3d viewport, only to have my viewport try to keep the cursor restrained. This means I am trying to close the goddamn dialogue and my cursor is nowhere to be found, and I am now clicking on random things in the 3d viewport.

Again, loving it. The above points are things that annoyed me about Hammer that I noticed hadn't been changed yet in Sledge. The program looks ballin so far, can't wait for source support. Hey maybe you can even fix the cubemap problems we've been having for a year or so now.