The default scale is 0.25, which is correct for (nearly?) all of hl2's textures. I don't understand why you could have difficulty seeing the details though, as it's something I've never had any problems with. I don't know how experienced you are with hammer either, but you do realise that you can navigate around the 3d view while the camera tool is selected, by the simple combination of holding a mouse button down while moving the mouse, don't you? You can position yourself at any angle or distance from what you want to look at.

Moving the mouse while holdning down the;-
-left button, changes the direction you are facing, but not your position
-right button, lets you move up or down
-both buttons, move forwards/backwards.

You can also use shift+Z to give you a full sized version of the last viewport that you were active in.

And if you're having problems getting textures on neighbouring brushes to line up, then there's a simple way to do it. First, select the texture tool. Then click on the brush that is textured correctly. Then, holding down the Alt key, right click on the neighbouring brush, and voila.
(or hold down the shift key and right click on the brush to texture all of it's faces.)

If you've tried these alread, and none of them work for you, then you need to either buy a bigger monitor, get glasses, or, you could be as lucky as me, and end up with both. " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">

i see. i didn't realize that hammer showed a reduced quality texture. i thought it only looked different due to the lack of compile, lighting, engine etc.

i've still never had any problems with it though. at least none that i've noticed.

I know all that stuff that fishy suggested (i've been using Hammer since mid 2002 when it was called Worldcraft). What i mean is that if you:

1. Start up Hammer
2. Create a 128x128xany thickness brush
3. Texture the brush "dev/reflectivity_70" (it's a 512? texture with text on it) on the 128x128 face and align it properly
4. Notice how the text "reflectivity 70%" is hard to make out

I think I remember Hammer rendering the textures at an acceptable res when HL2 came out. It might be an update thing, I don't know. I was wondering if there was a way to increase the res. Thanks for the responses so far though.

• I have an ATI Radeon 9600XT (Sapphire) 256Mb
• My desktop res runs at 1024x768 (I doubt this is the problem)
• I use a CRT monitor with a VGA connector (I've always had this VDU but remember the Hammer tex rendering to be clearer)
• What was that you said about glasses? I couldn't make that out?

It may in fact be the GFX card, I also disabled the ATI stuff in services.msc. The problem with unclear textures is that it's hard to properly scale, align, use only the parts that i want to use of textures for faces that are smaller than the textures themselves like texturing control panels, light switches and other small but important faces. I also tried the "filter texture" box already and no - it didn't work.

Ok, I may have found the answer. I installed 2 Gb of RAM yesterday (compared to 256 Mb I had before) and I tried Hammer again just now and the textures are crystal clear. Hammer may have settings that automatically adjust to how well your system is coping.

Or, the video settings in HL2 have something to do with it, before the upgrade, the texture quality defaulted to "low" but now with the 2 gigs, it defaults to "high".

I will say though that after I gave up on Hammer and before I got the RAM I have been using the parameters, "-dxlevel 80" first to see what everything looked like ingame and "-dxlevel 90" to set it back and left that parameter in there. Note: I have a DirectX 9.0 capable GFX card.

My advice to anyone else who has this problem is to either install more RAM or free up system resources using CTRL + ALT + DEL with Windows XP and disabling active processes or you free up space on your Hard Drive which I think has something to do with Virtual Memory or something.

Thanks for everyones help and input