Forum posts

Yeah, good idea on making the change in the texture tool, that way the result in Sledge should look exactly the same as the result in the exported MAP.

I'll make the change when I can, but I'm working on a large restructure at the moment so it might take a while until it arrives.

It's very strange that the alignment is fine with Hammer's 0.1875, but not with Sledge's 0.188. I'd say it's more of a problem with how the compile tools are reading the MAP file, but I couldn't say for sure. That's a very odd error.

I think the easiest solution is simply to limit the output to two decimal places in the MAP file (i.e. use 0.19 instead of 0.188), even if that is slightly different to what Hammer does. If you agree with that fix, I'll create an issue in the bug database to make that change. Thanks for helping with the bug diagnosis!

The difference between the two MAP exports for that face might be enough to help. If you could just paste in the relevant line from each MAP export, it might give me a hint as to what the issue is. (Though, if you're having trouble replicating it, it might not be that easy)

If you have time, could you copy that brush into a standalone RMF file and upload it somewhere? I think the issue might have something to do with how Hammer and Sledge generate .MAP files and it would be useful to be able to compare both programs using your example.

@padrogue: try toggling the numbers up and down in the texture tool, I don't know if it will help but it's worth a shot. (i.e. press "up" on all 4 number boxes, and then press "down" on them all)

How does the texture appear in Hammer? Fixing the alignment in Hammer might fix the problem, I don't think Sledge would "unfix" it unless you edit the face again.

@Jeffmod: There's a checkbox in Sledge that does that.

@Rim: Yeah, I want to support a scripting language eventually. Python will probably be the one I choose because there's a good .NET library for it. I want to have it for plugins as well as a command-line in the UI itself that you can run once-off changes on. The rewrite wont immediately allow for plugins/scripting, but it's definitely something I want to add eventually.

Yeah, wxWidgets is really the only good option if you want cross-platform support without buying into a full framework like .NET/Java/Qt/GTK+. It has bindings to a lot of languages as well. I haven't used it before but I've heard that it's quite nice.

Sledge will use the sprites from the game folder before anything else, so you can copy the sprites into your game folder (overwrite the SOHL ones) and it should work.

If you're using Steam HL, you can use the SteamPipe system - create a folder called "modname_addon" (e.g. "cstrike_addon") and put the sprites in there - they will be used instead of the sprites in the base mod folder.

Example:
SteamApps/Common/Half-Life
SteamApps/Common/Half-Life/modname [sohl sprites are in here]
SteamApps/Common/Half-Life/modname_addon [your custom sprites are in here]

The directory structure should be the same for both folders (there should be "sprites" and "models" subfolders, etc).

@Alberto: The same question was asked on Github, here was my response:

[quote]
I'm doing a big rewrite of the UI in an effort to support things I want to add in the future. The most important reasons are:

• Linux/Mac support (hopefully, though Mono might not be complete enough to work properly)
• Multi-language support (definitely)
• Support for plugins (eventually)
• Multi-user mapping over the Internet (eventually)
• A more robust & context-sensitive command system like the Source 2 Hammer Editor
• More nice things to make things easier for me

Since I'm working on something like this, the main branch isn't moving right now, but work is still happening!
[/quote]

I have some versions of Spirit hosted, I haven't tested any of them, they're just files that I had laying around. I don't know if they're any different to the ones on ModDB, but they're hosted here if you want to try a different download: Click here

(I tried the 1.4 FGD and it's broken, but you can fix it pretty easily by removing an extra bracket)

Edit: Also just tried the 1.8 download and it's the same as your one, so no improvements there.

For the last issue, you can probably just change the property in item_camera:

targetname(string)
with:
targetname(target_source)

I think Sledge just uses the last type that was defined, but it sounds like Hammer needs them to be the same type. If it's still broken in Hammer, you could just remove targetname from the item_camera altogether, because that property is already defined for that class in a base class.

It's weird that the FGD from ModDB is broken. I've heard that some people avoid 1.8+ versions of SOHL and stick to 1.4 or so, maybe this is one reason why they do that?

Yep, that FGD is broken. Probably best to find a new one because you don't know what other problems it has, but you can fix it by doing this in a text editor:

Line 1295 (@Pointclass [...] calc_subratio) - Comment this line (put "//" at the start)

Line 1346 (3 : "Fail) - Put at " character at the end (3 : "Fail")

After that it should load correctly (at least it does in Sledge, I don't have Hammer installed at work)

Sledge reports on the line number that it finds the error on - maybe you're using an old version?

Are you trying to load both the HL and the SOHL FGDs at the same time? I'm not sure if you're supposed to do that, but the "things being multiply defined with different types." message makes it sound like you should only use the SOHL FGD. I could be wrong, I've never used it before.

If you post the FGD you're using on pastebin, we can take a look at it to see if it's a problem with the FGD or with your setup.

The only difference between .NET and something like Qt is that with Qt, every application needs to ship with 30mb of runtime DLLs. With .NET, it's a once-off 50mb download (you only need to download the latest framework in most cases, it is backwards compatible).

As a programmer as well, I prefer code that is fast, reliable, AND supports first-class functional programming, reflection, dynamic typing, on-the-fly code generation, is easy to read and write, and integrates seamlessly with OS-level services. .NET has all of this - try writing something like Reactive Extensions or Linq-to-SQL in C++ - you will find that it's impossible.

I'm not going to debate the issue, though. With .NET going open source, you should expect to see more applications created with it

There might be something wrong with your PC, xawari. All .NET apps start in <1 second on my computer and idle at 0% CPU. The runtime is included with new Windows versions, and for older Windows versions it's a 50mb download. I'd recommend doing a reinstall of the framework if you're having trouble with it, or perhaps do a memtest to see if you have some faulty RAM installed.

That's not really all that crazy or complicated

@CapT: Still rewriting everything, it will be a while before there's an update.

Black Friday is very much an American thing. The only place you'll see it outside of the US is from online stores based in America. And on Youtube where you can see the videos of thousands of idiots stampeding each other to death so they can save 10 bucks on a laserdisk player or whatever's cool these days.

Wikipedia actually says that we're both correct

JBOD (abbreviated from "just a bunch of disks") is an architecture using multiple hard drives, but not in a RAID configuration, thus providing neither redundancy nor performance improvements. Hard drives may be handled independently as separate logical volumes, or they may be combined into a single logical volume using a volume manager like LVM; such volumes are usually called "spanned".

I meant the "separate logical volumes" one, because the other one just sounds insane

Not sure what your JBOD is rufee, but I meant "Just a Bunch of Disks", which means literally just that - as in, do nothing special with the hard drives whatsoever, you just have a bunch of disks.

Companies who sell pre-packaged gaming PCs use RAID as a buzzword to get more sales, because the average gamer would know that "it's better", but they don't tend to think of the downsides. The vendors don't have to worry about what happens when you want to upgrade later, and they don't care about the inconvenience caused by a HDD in a RAID setup failing (which will probably be out of warranty).

In the end it's your call, but I would never consider a striped RAID setup, especially in a normal desktop PC. Use mirrored or a hybrid like RAID 5 in your file server (not your desktop) if you want data redundancy, but that's expensive and usually unnecessary. I would only consider RAID for fault-tolerance (not performance) in a server environment, and for me it has absolutely no place in a desktop PC.

Yeah, and really, the speed increase for game loading times isn't going to be a lot anyway. Remember that most games are designed for consoles, which still use optical drives and low-power 5400rpm HDDs. The increased speed of SSD/RAID is nice and all, but nowhere near the increase in cost/frustration/effort/failure rate that both of them have.

I wouldn't recommend RAID. Just run JBOD like a normal person, you'll be much happier in the long run (when it's time to replace/upgrade a HDD). Save RAID for when you're building servers or something, don't waste your time and happiness dealing with that nonsense for a simple gaming setup. Obviously you don't need backup or redundancy if you're just gaming. If you really want to save that extra 10 seconds launching a game, get the larger SSD and put the games that you play a lot on that.

Also, it seems a bit of a waste to get a powerful GPU like that and then skimping on the CPU. The price increase to get the i7 isn't all that much.

Sledge doesn't support displacements yet, but until then you can create your displacement in Hammer 4 and use Twister to turn the VMF into geometry.

Link removed. What is KBAT, by the way? I've never heard of it.

Try saving your map as RMF, and then close it and re-open the RMF. Something is weird with that VMF, but I'm not sure what the problem is yet.

There's a setting in General > Interaction called "Open object properties when creating an entity" - you can turn it off. What's the error when you try to clip that object? Did "check for problems" say that anything was invalid before you clipped it?

No, they're just sort of rough concepts that I've thought about a little bit, but not tested to see how viable they are. I haven't written any down before, but here's a few options:

For example, say you wanted to carve a hexagon into a rectangle:The default carve behaviour will start at one of the faces of the hexagon and simply iterate all faces in a dumb way. This usually means the carve will rotate around the solids:One idea to improve this is to be smarter about picking the next face to carve - the one with the greatest angle between plane normals should produce a larger "chunk" per carve (I call this the "alternate" method, because it tends to alternate between sides):A second idea is to draw "lines" from the corners of the carving solid to the corners of the carved solid. This would form a more pleasing "bevelled" type look to the carve result and might end up easier to manage. There are quite a few gotchas in this implementation, though. Some corners would need multiple "lines", depending on the positioning of the corners, and a naive implementation creates more objects than the classical method. It also might not work so well when the carved object doesn't completely contain the carver, though it's probably possible to code that in. (I call this the "corners" method)Another idea is to first carve the bounding box of the object (keeping the result), and then do the full carve on that resulting object. This minimises the length of non-straight lines in the result, but potentially creates more brushes in the result. (I call this the "bounding" method)Again, I'm not entirely sure how great these ideas are (especially the "corners" one), and there are probably other (better) methods that I haven't thought of. These different methods can probably be combined to improve the results further (e.g. the "bounding" method and the "alternate" method can probably be combined quite easily).

Edit: corners might work if both bounding boxes are intersected and carved before the method is applied:First the two bounding boxes are intersected:Then both objects are carved by the intersecting bounding box using the "bounding" method. After that, the result of that carve then has the "corners" method applied:I dunno, it might work. "Corners" seems like it would produce the most desirable result in most cases, but it also feels like it won't work (producing invalid solids) in some situations, or that it might be the most difficult one to implement.

Carve is still exactly the same as Hammer, so there's probably work to be done in that space. I'm in the middle of rewriting the UI right now, so I'm not working on that stuff for the time being.

I've had a couple of suggestions in relation to an improved carve method, but I haven't had the time to investigate if they are actually better or not.

I think Hammer assumes that your WAD files are on the same drive as your compile folder. Reference the WADs from your Steam common directory instead of from a different hard drive, and it should work. Spaces in the path are probably fine.

The error message says that it needs a close paren - check that your

((brackets) (are (balanced)))

What would happen if you hit "go to" when multiple entities are selected? Just go to the first one in the list?

Thanks Mange for your comments and everyone else for the suggestions and discussion. Source support is still a while away, but it'll get there eventually!

I've been working on a really large change (I'm not even sure if it'll even work yet or not) to get support for Linux and Mac operating systems, plus support for multiple language translations. Sorry for the lack of updates/fixes, this is a massive and difficult change and I've still got a long way to go before it is usable.

@Jessie: Even if there was Halloween over here, nobody knows what Monster Hunter is, so you're screwed either way

Though the same can be said about Brendan's Attack on Titan costume. Though I'm not sure how mainstream AoT has gotten in the US, so it might be ok?

I didn't interpret it to be the same. This tile thing seems like a way to quickly build a prototype map, whereas Archie's thing sounds more like a shortcut to add detailed brushwork.

All those games have a 2D map, but Hammer/Sledge is fully 3D. I get how that method works for 2D, but I don't know how that extends into three dimensions.

I'm afraid I still don't get it, could you go into more detail? Displacements are heightmaps, I don't understand how they could operate in 3D, let alone with models.

Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by tile-based mapping? DOTA2 (and Alien Swarm) can do it because it's essentially a 2D map, but how does the concept of tiles work when you're mapping in full 3D?

Seems like a very handwavey idea. How exactly would you expect something like that to be implemented? How would it stretch/scale to different sized brushes without looking silly?

Something like that might be possible, but it needs to have a bit of thought put into how it would work. It's difficult to justify a feature that requires quite a large amount of user setup to function correctly - not many people would use it if it was difficult to set up.

The format is VMF (Hammer 4 map format), it's sort of a mix between JSON and XML.

That sounds pretty cool, if I wasn't busy with other stuff I would definitely look into the UE4 stuff.

I don't know TCL, but looking at that error message:

$triggered && ([b]$ignorecheck == -1[/b]) && ([b]$chancheck = -1[/b] || $e...

It looks like its using double equals '==' and single equals '=' for comparisons, this seems incorrect. Try changing that single equals to a double equals and see what happens.

@Kythesis: What DiscoStu said, basically. Sledge will also support Sven 5.0 with its enormous map sizes (though the current version of Sledge only goes up to 65,536 units whereas Sven 5 will support 131,072 units).

@DiscoStu: Honestly, I never even considered that. I just took a look, and it appears that Hammer is the one with the internal clipboard. Sledge uses the native Windows clipboard, but Hammer doesn't put anything into it when you copy, it's all handled internally. This explains why you can't copy/paste between two Hammer instances.

Fun activity: try copying something in Sledge and then pasting into a text editor

Yes, please post it, it sounds very interesting! If you're losing interest in the project, is there any chance of you releasing the source code under a GPL or MIT/BSD license? I work on a Hammer alternative called Sledge and I want to expand its model-viewing capabilities, and I eventually want to create a standalone model viewer of my own. I'd be super interested in seeing your code!

That's a pretty interesting idea. I also want to implement Rimrook's idea for the custom grids (triangle, hexagon, circular, rotated, etc) at some point.

The next release is going to take quite a while because I am going to try porting the interface to GTK instead of WinForms, which is cross-platform (Mac/Linux) and has better support for multiple language translations. After that I want to start borrowing some of the general ideas from the new DOTA 2 Hammer, especially the more advanced 3D editing features and some of the UI concepts.

@RB: Zoner's tools are kind of outdated. Do you know about VHLT?

The bug was in posting, not displaying. The database is blank for the blank posts.

££££££\\\

The issue with certain special characters making the posts blank should be fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience. Here is a link with technical details of the problem for those interested.

Unicode is still not supported and will just do this silly thing: &#12354; (this is due to the western charset which will break too many things to change easily) I fixed the stupid backslash thing so now you can paste log files without path names C:Program FilesLookingLikeThishlrad.exe

@tet: I'm not entirely sure how Source is structured but I would guess that the main function and the game loop are both part of the closed source portion of the engine client.

I'm off to Japan for two weeks on Saturday, I'll try to remember to take some photos with my shitty phone and post them here when I get back

Sorry, don't mind my snappiness. I'm just annoyed that false positives still exist :/

I honestly would recommend switching AV programs, though. I have used ESET for several years now (since AVG went to shit), and I've never had a false positive from it, ever.