Unreal vs Source.

Unreal BSP editing tools are currently, hands-down, the most powerful bsp tools available in a traditional CSG-style level editor.

Unfortunately, the interface for dealing with brushwork remains fairly primitive and hasn't gotten as much love as Epic shifts to more of BSP foundations covered with static mesh detail. Radiant and Hammer remain far more speedy for building and texturing brushwork (and Radiant still has a pretty massive lead on Hammer there), but if someone were to add that level of construction efficiency to the Unreal tools... game over, man, game over.

Interested to see what direction id takes the editor for id tech 5, though.

Fo'gettaboudit. Radiant takes 'em all. On a serious note, I believe that each editor has several good things that other lack. Radiant is great for patches (curves). Hammer is great to create terrain. Unreal ED is more suitable for modular level design.

-Method

For simple leveldesign, I'd go with Source.

But if I had the chance to make a mod, I'd go with UE since Source is such a dumb thing to work with, exporting, compiling etc. Like a simple small prop, you'll spend more time making it work ingame that you'd spend on making the damn thing.

I think Hammer is more userfriendly than UE, but if you want to learn UE, you'll get it in no time.

Quote from st0lve

But if I had the chance to make a mod, I'd go with UE since Source is such a dumb thing to work with, exporting, compiling etc. Like a simple small prop, you'll spend more time making it work ingame that you'd spend on making the damn thing.

Amen

For me it comes down to one thing: the result.

To my eyes the lighting, shading, and rendering in source almost always looks more natural, more real. In all other engines I've worked with the result has this plasticy, unnatural look and it's not just the artistic capabilities of the people using the tools. Even if other modern engines can handle more polygons, or have better tools, or are more streamlined in asset creation, the result just never looks as good. At least, to me.

It takes a little more effort in one editor to do some things, and a little more effort in another editor to do another thing. But you can make the exact same geometry in any engine, so long as it can support the number of polygons.

For example, patches. Sure bezier surfaces are really easy to create and manipulate, but you can make the same thing with pyramical brushes.

So for me it all comes down to how well the engine can render the scene.

What I like in UT99:

-Noob friendly editor

-Every actor inherit code from a parent class, makign it easy to change properties and behavior

-Fast rebuild process

What I liked in gtkradiant:

-Ability to merge vertexs

-Stability

-Manipulating brushes was somewhat more friendly than in UED

-Gave up on it because I couldn't stand the extremely long compiling process, specially with light bounces. And I didn't quite understand its hint brushes.

Quote from Method

Hammer is great to create terrain. Unreal ED is more suitable for modular level design.

I haven't used UnrealEd, but Unreal's terrain capabilities are far better than Half Life 2's. For starters, it doesn't use vertex blending, and secondly, you can have more than two textures. For creating it, I'm not sure between the two.