What's new for HL1 in 2019? Created 5 years ago2019-08-01 06:19:54 UTC by quux

New to the forum but I've been mapping in HL from the beginning. It's great to see a community still developing for HL1! I took the last few years off though and am wondering what the lay of the land is now re tools for HL1. Last time I mapped I was still using Zoner's HLT and Valve Hammer Editor (3.4???).

Welcome! The Tools and Resources page should have everything you need to know.

Yeah, check Pb's link above, but I highly recommend J.A.C.K / Sledge and Vluzacn's compile tools.

If you're last experience was Hammer, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Also welcome! Glad to see new members keeping the HL1 modding community alive.

Vluzacn's compilers are a must. Sledge is great when it works, but unfortunately it often doesn't in my experience. I may have to give JACK a try someday, with so many people recommending it.

J.A.C.K., VHLT v34 (Vluzacn's Half-Life Tools), and HL Texture Tools.

J.A.C.K. provides a nice set of features:Direction arrows for light_spot, light_environment and other entities that need such a thing, faithful model rendering, long file path support (Hammer never liked paths with spaces or ones that were too long, no more need to store stuff in C:/Hammer ), a much more comfortable-to-use Vertex Manipulation tool that now finally selects all parallel vertices when you try to select multiple ones with a single click, still runs on my 2005 HP Compaq yadda yadda yadda.
It's free, the paid version on Steam is... not something you'd wanna invest into right now. It's on hlfx.ru somewhere. Here, to be exact.

Either way, it has less quirks than Hammer. One of the quirks is to install J.A.C.K. somewhere NOT in Program Files or Program Files (x86) because it then wouldn't be able to write to its config files. Otherwise, should work just fine and peachy.

Vluzacn's fork of ZHLT, called VHLT, latest version being v34, is the state-of-the-art set of compilers for GoldSrc mapping. Basically, CSG, BSP and VIS are much faster, RAD takes a bit longer but delivers more beautiful lighting. It has func_detail, which is often useful if you've used func_wall a lot for small props and whatnot, though this feature has been available for a while, I believe. Same thing goes for ZHLT 2.x era light flags, where "blue" masked textures can cast shadows.HL Texture Tools is pretty straightforward for WAD and sprite creation. WADs are standard, you just gotta have 8-bit BMPs, and in the case of masked textures, appropriate colour palettes. HL Texture Tools with sprites also allows you to easily change their orientation settings, something that can be pretty useful if you want 'fixed' sprites that don't face the player, but rather only a specific direction:Welcome back to the glorious mapping land. ^^

J.A.C.K looks really cool, I should try it, Been using Hammer v3.5 for like months now.

Been using Hammer v3.5 for like months now.

Months. Haha. That's cute.

Heh.

Btw, great presentation Admer.

Months. Haha. That's cute.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT: Huh, actually a year and half now that I checked the date I published my first map but that's still nothing compared to mapping veterans

I am using J.A.C.K and I gotta admit, it does everything for me. It shows how the glass will look, it will show models...wait, Admer456 told all that. Anyway, it is just cooler than Hammer, but there is one big downside of this. If you like using Prefabs, then you are screwed up. It has a rock prefab though, which is cool, I guess.

Prefabs are for pussies. Lol.
There are, however, all of the WC prefabs packed together in a single .map file somewhere, so you can just copy them into your map.

Yes, this is right. Prefabs are limited, and they don't let you unleash your full creativity. But what if I want to make Black Mesa Parking and I need to put all of the jeeps? It is easy, simple and it is good. If you don't use prefabs, that's OK. You get to make everything by yourself, you take the credit for it. In a Compo with limited time, however, Prefabs are some of your friends. I am giving an example: I put a beatiful lamp in a hallway. It is so good and everyone loves it. But my hallway is not small, and I need multiple of these lamps. Oh wait, it doesn't stop there! The next room is in another map, that will be transmissioned. What do I do? For the first map, that I already created the lamp, I can just copy it over and over again. But for the second one? I have to rebuild it or copy it. If it has a lot of small details, there is no way I am going through it again. It is time consuming. And as I mentioned earlier, it is a Compo's last week (putting the fact of the Water Splash Compo ending in less than a week). Well, I just make the lamp in a prefab (relatively easy to do), and then I use it, not only for the next map, but till the dawn of the self deleting files starts appearing on the front. (just joking, this will never happen...probably )

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In conclusion, Prefabs are childish, but not time consuming. Use them when you need some time.

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This is something like an answer to Admer456. I think so. I wrote it all so I can refute what he wrote.
And also to open the eyes of the members of TWHL about the usage of prefabs.

See ya.

Fortunately, The Core has a prefabs map that we can just dip into and grab the prefab we need. Helps with collaboration between myself and Archie this way too, rather than having two separate prefab libraries.

As I said, AK47nator, there's a map file that contains each WorldCraft prefab, so you can just select a group of brushes, copy, go back into your map, and paste. uwu

Personally though, as I'm trying to be outside of HL's universe as much as possible, I got no use of the vanilla prefabs.

Therefore, if you wanna compensate for the lack of prefab libraries, make a separate folder called "Prefabs" and save map files there that only contain prefabs.

It's definitely worth making your own prefabs these days. You can still have an authentic Half-Life look but modernised a little. Goldsource is quite robust and there is no need to stick to the terribly outdated WorldCraft 2.0 prefabs.

"Goldsource is quite robust and there is no need to stick to the terribly outdated WorldCraft 2.0 prefabs."

Pretty much. ^

Holy shit, thank you so much everyone! I honestly hadn't expected there to be much in the way of new tools, looks like I've got some catching up to do! That should be fun, given I got so used to the workflow of the same old tools for 20 years, funny how so much of it is still in muscle memory, lol.

Yeah JACK is basically the way to go. It's not perfect, but by far the best offer on the market. And it works on Linux! (So do the VHLT, so they seem to be very slow on Linux). I'd recommend you stick with the free version for now, the Steam version costs 10 bucks and it brings very little apart from useless distracting achievements.
For textures, I'm still using Wally. Half-Life Texture Tools seem to have a problem adding textures to an already existing wad.
To view models, I belive Solokiller's model viewer is the best choice: https://github.com/SamVanheer/HL_Tools/releases.

Loulimi, you probably need to manually add "-threads 4" parameter to every vhlt tool, whatever number of threads you got

Bruce might be right, I remember there was a comment that VHLT might not auto detect number of threads on the machine, which would cause it to run on one core.
Try running it and then take a look at CPU usage with htop or something.

Well I'm not mapping on Linux now but that's good to know! I'll try it next time I map on Linux.

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but I see people discussing choices of texture-editors. I created an online one at http://www.j0e.io/tools/wad-editor/. I'm hoping that the community will find it useful and possibly contribute to the project (I'll probably have to change the name then). It supports all the major image formats, but not sprites currently. I would love to hear feedback/suggestions. I also wrote a tutorial on that website detailing how WADs work so if any other ambitious programmers want to develop their own editors. I'm all about keeping the HL community going.