SPLIT: L4D Tools Discussion

also valve has released sketchup mapping tools?

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... urce_Tools

seriously? I hate sketchup with a passion. I cant help but think that effort would be better spent bringing hammer up to moder day standards. It's a little annoying waiting 2 hours to see how your lighting changes turned out when crysis does it in real time.

Quote from JoshuaC

The L4D Authoring tools are out for those interested.http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... eft_4_Dead)

Page was removed.... however the beta is available apparently. I just enrolled in the beta for the sdk... dling a rather large update now.

Figures. Hammer locks up right when it starts and model viewer crashes instantly.

The last ) is part of the link, which is why it's not showing up.

The sketchup tool is just a plugin for exporting basic blockins to Hammer. The worst part about using sketchup for quick layout work is you have to re-do it after, so this spares you that. It's not a required tool to make anything.

Hammer appeared to freeze at first but then ran fine after. The lighting preview mode actually works fairly well now, though it's still not as strong as D3's render mode or UEd's game mode.

Quote from KungFuSquirrel

The last ) is part of the link, which is why it's not showing up.The sketchup tool is just a plugin for exporting basic blockins to Hammer. The worst part about using sketchup for quick layout work is you have to re-do it after, so this spares you that. It's not a required tool to make anything.

Hammer appeared to freeze at first but then ran fine after. The lighting preview mode actually works fairly well now, though it's still not as strong as D3's render mode or UEd's game mode.

I forgot that the lighting preview apparently works in OB now, I'm always working in episode 1 so I dont have that luxury. I'll have to check that out.

As for sketchup I just can't really stand using it. I guess after using hammer for so long I just prefer to do the blocking with brushes and cut out the middleman. Personal preference I guess but it's still time I would have rather seen valve spend elsewhere.

how about making that work for people who dont have l4d, i have tf2 though but whatever i seem to do i cant get the orange box hammer to work all it gives me is white lines in 2d views and even more blobs of white in 3d view and i cant even navigate around in it. way to go valve

any other new hammer features?

Quote from rockdude86

how about making that work for people who dont have l4d, i have tf2 though but whatever i seem to do i cant get the orange box hammer to work all it gives me is white lines in 2d views and even more blobs of white in 3d view and i cant even navigate around in it. way to go valve

what game are you trying to use it for? if i forget to switch the engine in the SDK menu and load an Ep1 game like css with the orange box sdk, then i get white wireframes too. you need to make sure you pick the same engine that the game itself uses.

Quote from JoshuaC

Woah I like the lighting preview. Though I don't get why they can't just make it load lightmap data from the .bsp and overlay it in the editor for you to look at.

Because that would require a compile, and that would sort of defeat the purpose now wouldnt it?

Has something changed about the light preview? Still looks useless to me.

It took them this long to release an L4D SDK without any major changes to Hammer? Wowzer.

For Hammer, there's probably all kinds of Ep3 stuff attached to it that they have to decouple for the SDK release. Which is maybe why it took so long for essentially a non-update. Shrug.

Quote from JoshuaC

I'd like to be able to see the previous version of lighting in the editor so I could made adjustments to it. The lighting preview is nice but it's far from an accurate representation of what it looks like ingame.

The problem is the second you adjust it, it would have to either re-compile, or totally break everything. Unless they go fully dynamic (which they probably won't anytime soon), the best they can do is give an approximation. The same is true in UnrealEd. Your previous baked lighting is there, but the second you move a light or rebuild an object it's all tossed out and replaced with a dynamic approximation. The important thing is you can actually get the foundation of your lighting where you want it without having to waste time on compile after compile.

Also I think I'm going to break this subthread out into its own discussion...

I think we should squirrel. Though I also never used google sketchup, did you know you can carve in it and never crash, because it carve's in quads? Google sketchup also has it's own lighting preview and can place entities for hammer to use, but can't do normal things like place logic and work with I/O.

GOOGLE SKETCHUP DEFEATS HAMMER TEN TIMES OVER BUT CAN'T USE LOGIC_RELAYS

Google seems to win people over again.