Journal #8730

Hack all the hammer dialogs!

Interesting.
I could be entirely wrong, but to me it looks like that 'layers' dialog was intended for some kind of precursor to visgroups in Source.
Also, animating brushes in-editor would have been awesome. As is, I find there's way too much trial-and-error involved in any kind of complex motion using path_corners.

I second what Jeff said. The layers dialog was probably conceived based on the layers mechanics of AutoCAD, Illustrator, or other graphics programs. Sort of like Visgroups. Layers might have been cleaner, but maybe it's just visgroups that are only poorly implemented. It looks like it's probably the most interesting of them all.

As for the animation control, perhaps it was originally planned to edit models as well then that feature was dropped.

Let's ask Valve!

Layers type behaviour could be easily done with visgroups - you'd just need to be able to select an "active" visgroup that all newly-created items will automatically be added to. (I don't know if Hammer already has this option?)

I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Animation is more logically something that was going to be used for models, as in animate their movement/animation frames. Since they could not implement it properly or was too complex they simply made ALL models animate as they are placed into hammer.