I am reliefed to see that I am not the only one who does not consider Source as a 100% perfect engine. I have tried saying something about that in the past but in the beginning it seemed like everyone found it superior to everything else.
I like emailing Valve with rants so I might also link them to this:)
There is a mapping community. Mapcore is only a part of it. I know a few other forums with plenty of mappers. And the hl2 modding community is everything else then small. Only Battlefield 2 has a similar huge modding community.
I think the reason you don't see so much is because so many people work on mods. I for example map, model, skin and texture nearly every day but i cant show the most of it because the mod isnt released yet.
Next year the situation will change imo. There will be some good mods released.
Quote from Fletch3) I'd love to have custom textures, but the texture importing interface is quite possibly the shittiest tool I've ever seen. So now I need a texture artist who also hopefully knows Unix or whatever the hell it's running.
It isnt that hard if you get the photoshop .vtf plugins. Just export your texture to .tga and create a simple .vmt in like 2 seconds.
I dunno, I like source but the tools could be improved. What Quakis posted is possibly the biggest issue in Hammer 4. It's annoying.
The fact that the new hammer has a bunch of other easily-fixable but ever-present bugs is another issue.
I added a load of stuff to this wiki page months ago:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... mer_Editor
It all remains unfixed 
The lack of shading in hammer 4.0 is a godsend when working on flatshaded maps though 
i totally agree on all critique concerning the tools used for hl2, however i find the engine more or less superior to anything we have now BUT the shitty tools undo that superiority and that leaves us with.... nothing at all.... but like steppenwolf said i believe things will change within half a year or so... when mods start coming out things will start to live up again.
also i dont remember the hl community being HUGE in just a year....
ill just wait and see... and as far as its concerning the tools right now.. well the ones who want to have found their ways of doing things.
its up to valve now....
The SDK is being updated to add HDR and DoD support, but my God had they better include some bonafide updates to Hammer. It really is beyond a joke now.
I'd like to say it was a good thing that I'm agreeing with so many people in this thread, but when the points put forward are so depressing, you quite simply lose any positivity.
They should fix the annoying inverted alphamaps hammer bug before adding hdr to the sdk. 
I dread to think what kind of new bugs and other problems the HDR stuff will bring 
. I've heard scare-stories about having to dick about with a lot of content to get it working with HDR.. but I guess we have to just wait and see. There's already the cubemap problem, and an update a few months back made my hammer crash when HL2 was open.. It roughly coincided with the release that put in some of the Source engine support for DoD:S features before DoD:S actually shipped.
It's cool that valve keep adding stuff to their engines, but it'd be nice if they fixed up the old stuff and made it more useable first. The very fact that Valve encapsulated some of the SDK and pretty much all of the HL2 resources in .gcf files and didn't bother offering us a .gcf file-reading application was probably a fair hint from the start that modding was going to be a pain in the arse.
I agree on the lack of good, easy to get documentation. There's a lot of information around but it's scattered and sometimes requires a lot of time to get. I also agree that Valve should put some more time fixing annoying bugs like the inverted alpha and the cubemap/shadow problems. I haven't heard anything official about it, not even a 'we're working on it'. Those are things I'd like to see as well. Oh, and fix the model wireframe bug, and the Hammer crashing after HL2 bug, and so on. Auto-updates are fine with me but only if they're good updates. I can live with a few bugs, for a little while, but it's far from ideal and they have to get fixed if Valve is taking modding serious.
As for tools... I used a lot of custom tools for HL, and now it's the same. The custom ones improve working with Source a lot for me. vmtCREATE, StudioCompiler, VTF Explorer, PakRat... even though the mapping and modding communities haven't really taken off that much yet, the custom tools are already available. I've never really used Valve-provided tools to create textures and stuff, it was all custom. I don't believe that's what made HL so popular, the easy tools that Valve gave us. Worldcraft was probably the only really usefull tool in that time, the rest came from the community.
Yea there is some annoying bugs n stuff but imo source is still a dream to work with as modder. The game i modded before (Call of Duty) was a nightmare. There was no sourcecode and nearly no documentation and support for the sdk.
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