Unreal vs Source.

[Mkz]

What You See Is What You Get?

[MrBaracuda]

oh okai thank you :> thought it was some kind of technology D:

[Wunderboy]

Source has been frustrating me a LOT lately, even to the point of *wanting* to look at other things.

The quality of their SDK tools has always been a irritation for me and probably the only reason I end up writing my own. Why the hell they still have DOS apps for somethings I do not know...

I'm not the greatest C++ coder and have only been part-time coding with SDK for about 12 months. I really can't stand how buggy and hackish the SDK code is at times. I wish it was just of better quality especially when it comes to things like Linux compiles.

I appreciate that having the actual C++ gives you a lot more power but it seems half the time your fixing Valve bugs rather than actually making progress on your mod. I've actually be wondering if switching to a more script based engine (LUA) might be a better idea.

I've stuck with Valve for a long time but the more serious my gamedev work gets, the more I start to hate their tools/SDK.

[Sa74n]

nooo.. dont give up on them, wunderboy. youre tools are so helpful. we need more

[MrBaracuda]

Another thing I like about Unreal is that you can just load up other people's maps and look at them. Back then when I bought Unreal and didn't have access to the internet, I was stuck with the very limited documentation about the UEd. My English wasn't so great as well, so I basically taught all the stuff like elevators, 3d skyboxes and how to make water myself just by browsing their maps. Took me quite some time to figure out how to do water I had the zone set up and all but I was missing the zone actor or what it's called. I didn't see it in their zone before, because it was hidden behind an underwater plant model . Good times

What I also like is that you get the red outline of the brush or whatever you'll work with, instead of having to go the trial and error way hammer offers for stairwells and such.

[Wunderboy]

nooo.. dont give up on them, wunderboy. youre tools are so helpful. we need more

Well I'm still writing stuff and have a backlog of projects to finish. I know for a fact Valve use my stuff in house and Nem and I just did a small update of some of stuff specifcally to comply with in-house engine changes for EP2/TF2.

Ultimately I'm just writing the tools I need and it turns out you guys find them useful too hence why I give them away

[NykO18]

In fact, Hammer once had a "3D Lightning Preview View". Valve released it by error some months ago (or maybe a year, I don't remember), it was tricky and bugged, but this proves that they're actually trying to implement it. Unfortunately, they trashed it away with another update few days later.. the lighting preview AND the SO awesome Logical View.

Never knew why they trashed this logical view, this was kind of a chart of all the relations between entities in the map. Like an electronic chart and you could edit everything with few clicks.. Such a shame that they never released it, because it actually WORKED very well.

[MrBaracuda]

Ha! Rick_D didn't believe me when I told him they had that in at some point! HA!

[Defrag]

They could at least put in an approximation of lighting using real-time lights displayed in the hammer viewport. If the framerate died, we could at least turn it on/off when we needed it. You wouldn't get the subtlety that radiosity lighting has (like indirect lighting) but you would at least get a feel for the intensity, range, coverage, colour, mood etc. of lights.

I've seen presentations where Valve demonstrated how they integrated radiosity, normal mapping and various other graphical techniques and they showed a picture of the engine running without radiosity-based lighting. It was basically what I just pointed out -- it looked much the same but lacked subtlety & indirect lighting. It was still a good approximation of what to expect.

It's in here (click).

[hessi]

The quality of their SDK tools has always been a irritation for me and probably the only reason I end up writing my own. Why the hell they still have DOS apps for somethings I do not know...

well this is a point if you insist on graphical user interfaces. i for my self really like that their tools are command line based (it's NOT DOS! DOS is 'dead'). this means i can easily acces them and use them in my own tools/workflow. for example i can write a scriptfile that compiles a list of materials or qc files. using a guy would mean: open file. click on save as. give name. click ok. close. open next file.

i agree with you that some tools could need an additional gui, but blaming command line tools is such an unprofessional thing.

btw: that's something in general i hate about those people calling them selfs 'gameartist'. if a tool is not WYSIWYG the tool is crap. WTF! it is so much fast if you think about a problem and solve it instead of trying out over and over. the consequences are visible: people dont know what vmt files are good for or where to extract their maps or how to you a command line tool. i expect anybody working with computers to be able to run a commandline tool and use it. many Operation Systems force usage of a commandline. Mac OS, Linux, AIX are only a few. There are dozens of others. The only reason why Microsoft doesnt show up is that they are so popular due to their game support. people stayed with MS all the time because they wanted to play games. they felt comfortable with all those guis but when i write into a tutorial, that someone should change an environment varible people go like "wtf. i got no fucking idea".

[Sa74n]

you have to agree that there is no point in using a command line tool to convert tgas to vtfs if you couldve just released a photoshop exporter with the sdk. im very happy that atleast someone else made the effort to write that plugin.

theres plenty of things that would benefit some streamlining in the sdk. a proper way to preview materials and models in a semi-ingame environment wouldve been nice. i find it very annoying to always have to fire up the engine and load a map to look at texture changes (and if you added a new texture you'd have to recompile the map - or atleast a part of it). its just not very efficient and a lot of time gets lost handling the tools instead of spending it in maya or photoshop.

most of timesinks are hidden in hammer though. theres plenty of improvements that could be made. i liked it a lot back when i was basically working exclusively with wc/hammer but since i started working with other tools i see that its actually not very efficient to work with (i posted a wishlist on page 3).

[Sindwiller]

@ hessi

But you still need to admit that a integrated, GUI-based VMT editing and management tool would be useful at all...

[hessi]

you have to agree that there is no point in using a command line tool to convert tgas to vtfs if you couldve just released a photoshop exporter with the sdk. im very happy that atleast someone else made the effort to write that plugin.

there is a point: try to batch change like 100 textures without loading every file in photoshop. vtex does fine. plugin doesnt.

mazbe something trivial to you ppl, that all got legal photoshop licenses: some users dont want to participate in warez and use alternative graphics tools. for example gimp or Paint 3.0 or Corel Painter. Are there any plugins to those apps? NO! so valve would limit modding support on specific software which isnt what iwant from a software developer.

i want software that i can run on any system with pulic interfaces to any other software.

i am not sure but the VTF isnt open source, isnt it? so nobody could use it to implement a corel painter version. that's really crap. vtex instead runs fine with anz painting software because it doesnt need anz painting software at all.

[hessi]

@ hessi

But you still need to admit that a integrated, GUI-based VMT editing and management tool would be useful at all...

usefull... sometimes maybe but there are too many cases that require a more hacker like useage. and a thing i already mentioned: as soon as people use GUIs they forget about the stuff that is going on beyond the gui. then suddenly they haave to go hacker and then they know shit about the technology.

though a gui has to be updated with every implementation change. a commandline tool is updated much fast due to the absence of sliders and textfields.

thats another point: what is the difference between clicking into a pair of " instead of clicking into a textfield of a gui? i dont see any. it's still one click.

[Sa74n]

there is a point: try to batch change like 100 textures without loading every file in photoshop. vtex does fine. plugin doesnt.

mazbe something trivial to you ppl, that all got legal photoshop licenses: some users dont want to participate in warez and use alternative graphics tools. for example gimp or Paint 3.0 or Corel Painter. Are there any plugins to those apps? NO! so valve would limit modding support on specific software which isnt what iwant from a software developer.

i want software that i can run on any system with pulic interfaces to any other software.

i am not sure but the VTF isnt open source, isnt it? so nobody could use it to implement a corel painter version. that's really crap. vtex instead runs fine with anz painting software because it doesnt need anz painting software at all.

actually its not a big point, hessi. if you can load and save vtf files from within photoshop there is not really a need to convert 100s of textures. and i never said it should be a replacement to vtex (because after all there might still be rare cases when you need the batch functionality).

why do you complain about the lack of plugins for painter/gimp? there wasnt even a plugin for photoshop in the first place. personally i'd like to see those plugins available for every single grafics application that exists but theres no need to since photoshop is still industry standart - even without taking the cracked versions into account. i bet valve as well as every single source licensee uses photoshop for their 2d work.

besides, wunderboy and nemesis did write the vtflib which you can use to make plugins for any application (as far as i know).

VTFLib is an open source programming library which allows developers to add support for VMT and VTF files used by the material system of Valve Software's Source game engine. It functions independent of Steam allowing third party apps to use these file types without the need for Steam to be running.

to get back to the issue:

im not saying they shouldnt have developed the commandline tools but that valve shouldve released a proper package of additional development tools to speed things up. its just more efficient (for me that is).

edit:

im not talking about a material editor here. you have to deal with material files in any engine these days. what would be nice to have is a way to save textures directly from within photoshop (or any tool you prefer) to the game format and choose a template for the material (pretty much like 'save as concrete..', 'save as metal..' etc.) and it generates that material file for you (and saves it to the correct place). if you wish you'd still be able to jump in there and edit it manually. for most world textures it would do the job though.

and i agree that itd be more complicated to update all the tools when changes or improvements are made but if it was part of the source sdk and it was coded properly with that functionality in mind it wouldnt be too hard to do.

just my 2 cents