Model viewer and Hammer problems

Valve allways do something weird

I think there are like 3 people working on this at Valve. Though if you think about it, thats actually alot since other studios have even fewer than that working on their tools (i.e. 0)

yap. i can fully understand that. many game developers create their games on so crappy SDKs that they dont want to release any of the tools because you would have to workaround all features.

i think valve is doing a good job overall. i can understand that it would be cool if everything would work correctly, but 1. they dont profit from modding community that much (noone of us will buy another license of hl2 to use the sdk) 2. it is still a overall working sdk you get for free.

well, maybe some of you should work with non source engine games and check out their exporters. i remember flipped UVs or corrupted files from gamebryo (used in gothic 3 and oblivion and a bunch of other games).

This new guy they hired seems to have overlooked the fact that he could release the update as a beta. If it had been a beta we would be facing alot less issues. Hopefully he won't make the same mistake again. Though the the fact that they actually hired a guy to work on public tools is pretty remarkable, I don't think very many studios do this.

Quote from hessi

they dont profit from modding community that much (noone of us will buy another license of hl2 to use the sdk)

without the modding community hl1 would have been dead in maybe 2 years, counter strike and day of defeat would not exist, valve wouldn't have a name anywhere near they would now and hl2 probably wouldn't exist in its current form. half life is 90% the modding. they owe it to themselves to make a quality sdk.

Yes, I believe they also sort of planned to create a large modding community even before HL1 hit the shelves. Many of their moves points to that. They far surpased other guys like id in support.

Though tbh 2 years is a very long life span for a game with or without modding.

bicball: you should say: without CS. this is one mod. maybe you can add DOD but dod wasnt a that big success of modding as CS was.

and if you would read my message again it says "that much" which is not equal to: "nothing"

they have to think about: is it worth the money to pay someone with like 4000$ maybe a month to work on the dev tools for modding community. when will we get these 4000$ back? CS:S is played. DOD:S is played too. Which games or mods of the community gave this investment a sense?

you always have to think of those guys filling your favourite server. its them who bring the money. not us few 100 artists.

I think bicball is correct if you consider only the HL1 modding scene in its prime. Hl2 modding just isn't the same. I don't think they are going to benefit anywhere near as much from HL2 modding. Still it's remarkable they show even this level of support, especially with Unreal2007 and whatnot on the horizon.

Quote from Cipher

This new guy they hired seems to have overlooked the fact that he could release the update as a beta. If it had been a beta we would be facing alot less issues. Hopefully he won't make the same mistake again. Though the the fact that they actually hired a guy to work on public tools is pretty remarkable, I don't think very many studios do this.

From Mike Duran:

Quote

The reason that we are being so careful is that we learned it is not practical to do a beta of the new SDK while leaving the old SDK available. So this new release will not be a beta - it will replace the current version.

Quote from hessi

bicball: you should say: without CS. this is one mod. maybe you can add DOD but dod wasnt a that big success of modding as CS was.

Firstly, I agree that CS was one of the main reasons for HL's longevity. I also think it was a huge boon for valve and they honestly made quite a bit of dosh out of it. Want to play CS? You've gotta either buy CS retail or HL. They were still selling the game five years later and it was almost entirely down to the modding side of things. If that's not a reason for a company like valve to pay someone to concentrate on the SDK, I don't know what is.

As for HL2: gmod is HL2's big success, and I don't doubt it will sell by the truckload once it's on steam and re-written from the ground up. Valve will be taking something like a 50% share of the profits I think, so that's good business. What I also think is that valve really underestimated the support the community requires when it comes to modding these days. It's getting rather complicated and community created documentation just isn't cutting it. Their SDK has been a trainwreck in many areas.. I mean we're currently entering our third week of not having a working linux server. Our programmers had to fix countless bugs in the SDK because fixes were not forthcoming and it took a year to get an SDK code update. I think that says it all.

Hopefully with the new guy working on it and the new SDK base setup things will be a lot better, though. Huge updates will always run the risk of breaking a lot of stuff due to the mass changes. Valve has definitely done more than most, but it's not all altruistic -- they've got a great business acumen and obviously realised how big a role modding could play. Unfortunately I don't think they've given us enough support for HL2. There's some really, really esoteric stuff in the SDK and little or incomplete documentation in many areas.

i would agree to an incomplete documentation but the SDK is "working" from the artist side.

for exmaple hdr sky creation does work but their documentation talks of a tool that wasnt released to automatically cut image regions (some splitting.exe). to get you stuff done anyway you have to manually select each pixel and use the crop function from the menu of hdr shop. its not really a good or optimized workflow, but it works anyhow.

this is maybe a good example on the tools (for artists). some features work, some are missing or do not work.

the documentation lacks of details for the material system. for example there is a flag called "vertexcolors" or "vertexalpha" but there is no information on how to export or use these. that really is a pain in the ass.