Compiling Source Maps Without Hammer Created 15 years ago2009-02-19 20:36:23 UTC by BzerK

I just recently attempted to make a map for Counter-Strike Source, and was successful enough by myself, though I recently ran into a problem.

While the first version of my map compiled fine, as I added more stuff, the compiling began to take an extraordinary amount of time. The problem with this is, I'm mapping off of the SDK thing that comes with Steam, and its compiler tends to crash, in effect crashing my computer, that is if anything is done while it is compiling.

My computer decides to be stupid and after an amount of time (even though I turned the option off), it tries to save power by screwing with the display settings, which MAJOR kills the compiling process, making me have to hold the power button, something I NEVER want to do.

Now, my question (see, I wrote it really long so only people with an actual answer would read the whole thing and respond), are there any tools to compile a program in Source apart from the Hammer editor, such as a Batch compiler? I searched your web page and found nothing, as well as Google (apparently, as I should have expected, there are a lot of things that involve the keywords "map" "compile" and "source").

Thank you,
BzerK

I believe muzz's compilator was planned to eventually support Source compiling, but i don't know if that's included yet.
Personally, I just don't touch my computer when it's compiling a map.

If you optimise a map well enough, it should never take any more than 2 hours for a decently detailed, normal sized map.

I believe muzz's compilator was planned to eventually support Source compiling, but i don't know if that's included yet.

Source compiling support has been included, but at this point its not capable of compiling a Source map.

Won't be long.

Aside from the radiosity portion of the compile, which can eat a lot of time, especially for HDR-compatible maps, Source does a pretty good job of compiling your maps quickly...provided they are optimized well enough.

To answer your question, no, I don't think any of the source batch compiling programs work all too well, at least at the moment. I would recommend writing your own batch files, and using them to compile externally from Hammer - it won't cause issues with the tools during your compile, allows for more memory to be allocated to the compile process, and the commandline prompt won't freeze up like Hammer's status window, allowing you to see the progress of the compile.

The one downside I have experienced with batch compiles, which is a pretty minor issue overall, is that you have to run your BSP portion of the compile in Hammer...otherwise the materials don't get mounted properly and you run into a host of weird issues. The good thing is that the BSP process only takes a few seconds, if that, so it's a small price to pay for faster compile times.