IN THIS THREAD I WILL ANSWER YOUR SOURCE QUESTIONS

disp terrain:

create a brush. I like to start out with a 128 or 256 block. Click on one face and then go to the disp properties in the texture tool and click create. You can choose from 2 to 4 for how dense you want the mesh to be. To create a large section of terrain you have to turn multiple brush faces into terrain and then sew them together. To do this, you have to make sure the world brushes the terrain is created form is aligned perfectly with the edge of the other brush. Then select both faces and hit sew. To push/pull the terrain, select the meshes you want to modify while in the disp texture tool and use the brush tools available to raise or lower the terrain. You can also create noise and smooth. Terrain does not block vis, so you will have to create a brush underneath it to control that. amnother cool thing you can do is subdivide, which is very useful for creating caves and tunnels. try making a hollow cube, with all the faces on the inside meeting the other edges of the inside face edges, then select the interior faces and turn them into terrain and subdivide and it will smooth all the faces into a spherical shape. I've created entire cave levels with this process wich turns out pretty cool, though controling the vis is a bitch and the general process is pretty cpu intensive.

light_dynamic: this is the only way to create a dynamic light in source. It works like a light_spot, and has a max distace that shows up as a sphere to show how far the light will affect things. The bigger the sphere and the more faces it effects at once, the more expensive it is. You can parent these to physics objects or pretty much whatever.

There isn't a stock light ray effect in source. The only two ways I know of to fake it is with a model, or stacking glows that start small and bright at the light source and get bigger and more transparent as they get farther away.

I didn't know about the showbudget thing, I'll have try that out at work, maybe it's something they added recently.

I haven't ever tried to open any old rmfs or load wads in the new hammer, so I don't know how to address any crashing issues. The source maps are vmf's not rmf's.

Quote from -Stratesiz-

So much to learn. How about placing some nulled world brushes inside the terrain in order to vis block it? Is null still in use?I know the new format is vmf but you can also choose rmf from the open menu so there should be a way to port old work as promised. I guess hammer is somewhat buggy in its current state.

there should be a texture called "nodraw" It blocks vis and rad.

Quote from Kamikazi!

I'm trying to create water from the default materials, is it possible? I've tried them all and tried all the render modes. It still looks flat and not refractive like in the tech demo.

just use one of the new water textures (they look purple in the texture browser becuase they are normal maps) leave it as a normal brush. Rendermodes are no longer used, all that kind of stuff is supported in the shader for the texture.

It would take me way too long to explain everything new, and by this point I have a hard time remembering whats new and whats not. I haven't used hl1 in years.

hl2 supports animated textures. You number the tgas in the correct order, and then put a small bit of text in a txt file named the same as the texture and then run the txt file through vtex which compiles it into one vtf file. You can also use proxies to get animated effects (scrolling or fading of texture channels) but there is no way I could explain proxies in this thread off the top of my head.

I don't know about the steam thing.