so last night I decide to make a small custom prop for tf2. Nothing special, but it was the first model I'd tried to compile since the orangbox release. I'd forgotten that it had to be compiled in the orangebox/bin folder, so I was puzzled at the errors being thrown up.

After a bit of googling I realized my mistake, and set about the model compile with renewed enthusiasm. The enthusiasm, however, was short lived. The compile window threw up more errors, but this time it also gave some possible solutions. Great, I thought, it's only a matter of resetting the game configs in the sdk menu. But nope, that didn't seem to do a damn thing, so I tried one of the other possible solutions, which was to run vconfig to let the tools know what game I was compiling the model for. Vconfig laughed in my face when I tried running it, telling me that steam.dll couldn't be found. So I said 'feck this', hammer is my friend, I'll go back to playing with him.

Imagine my surprise when hammer crashed with one of those 'referenced memory can't be read' errors. This didn't help with the slowly growing bald patches on each side of my head, but a steam restart would fix everything. Wouldn't it? Hah!, no such luck. Everything that had been saved in hammer before I reset the game configs would open, but only for a few seconds. Then my firewall would ask if hammer could access the net. Whether I allowed it or not, hammer would then crash with the same error. If I started a new .vmf, then there was no problems. I could save, exit hammer, restart and reload the new .vmf

The only clue that I had was in my windows start menu. I found that it it didn't point to the correct folder, prog files/valve/steam, but to an older install, in prog files/steam. So, thinking there may be some sort of confusion between some old and new registry entries, I decided to uninstall the one in the start menu. Selecting the uninstall option brought up the dialogue box that has the nice little picture of a torch (flashlight to some) swaying away gently, with the almost hypnotic reasurance that it would find unwise.exe (or msi or something, but you get the picture). Anyway, I got pissed off waiting, and just riight clicked the steam entry on my start menu and deleted it. I know it's not the best thing to do, but by this time I didn't think it would make anything any worse. I decided a nights sleep would help me to make some sense of it all.

So, a new day dawns, with very few ideas on how to go about resolving my woes. One thing that I thought of trying was updating my vid drivers. I've been using ati's ver7.8 for a while now, because anything newer would crash tf2 games with a 'could not create d3d device' error. The last ones I'd tried were ver7.11, so I had a look to see if there were some more recent ones available. I found there were, but a couple of hours later, after all the hassle of uninstalling 7.8 and installing 7.12 (ati drivers are a pain) I found that the d3d device error was still there, so I had to go through the proccess again, reverting back to 7.8

At this point, there was little else for me to do other than uninstalling steam. I moved all of the custom content out of the steam dir, as well as all of the gcf's, and proceded to uninstall everything else.

Now, and this is the bit that really puzzles me, is that once steam was re-installed, and I'd run tf2 once to create a gameinfo.txt, when I tried to load any previously saved file in hammer, the exact same error was still there. wtf??? I can make new .vmf's, but I can't open any old ones or hammer dies??? I had to walk away from it, or the next hammer that was getting installed in my pc would have been straight out of a joiners bag. bah!

After a nice cup of tea, I decided to install and uninstall steam from both of the previously used dirs, hoping that if there was any conflict, that that would clear it up. I was less thorough with backing up my files this time, and forgot to save the tf2 gcf's. No great loss, but I'm still waiting on the game to download again before I can test it all out. ~90% atm, so it shouldn't be long.

I really wish my pc could feel pain, then I'd know exactly what to do.

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i eat paint

This sounds like a problem with Hammer, not steam.

See if someone else can open the VMFs. If they can't be opened by someone else, then the files are most likely corrupted.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I laughed, I cried... this is a brilliant retelling of one of the most momentous epics of our era.

:razz:

Did you try killing clientregistry.blob? Sometimes it seems like using steam is more akin to practicing voodoo than anything else. Speaking of which, sacrificing a goat couldn't hurt, and appears to be the next logical step.

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o

The sad part is if engines hadn't 'advanced' to the point of requiring models for every goddamn detail in the map this would have never happened, and Fishy would not be on the edge of a psychotic break

I have noticed some troubles when trying to set up the editor for hlep2. My 3d window will only show wire frame, not textured. Have you tried setting the SDK launch option "-engine ep1" ?. You should be able to open up all previous maps in Hammer with this setting. As for the new troubles, I'd say that valve has let the ball drop a bit with it's functionality.

Oh, and I was getting the d3d device error as well after installing my graphics card awhile back. Turns out that the mobo monitoring software was causing it,(Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 and the program was easytune 5). so I turn it off when playing HL. No more device error.

I can't open a hammer files ether. That last TF2 update caused it. As soon as that update installed itself hammer wouldn't run. I'm waiting for valve to patch it. I hope it doesn't take to long... I'm working on something right now.

This sounds like a problem with Hammer, not steam.

See if someone else can open the VMFs. If they can't be opened by someone else, then the files are most likely corrupted.

It is hammer. Even the backups on my flash drive wouldn't open.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Well, after a complete install/uninstall in both places that steam has been previously, and a final re-install where I actually want it to be, hammer was still crashing when I tried to open ANY .vmf, even the sdk examples. Hammer would open, allow me to start a new file and let me save it. It would also allow me to load the file again after exiting and restarting. Then, when I tried to open another file that was in the exact same folder as the file I'd just opened, boom, it was down again.

It's been a strange day indeed, but to make it even stranger, I actually found the help that I needed on, of all places, the steam forums. When tf did people who know what they're talking about start going there??? Anyway,

1. Open hammer.
2. Create a new map
3. Choose "3D Textured Polygons" from the View Menu (NOT "3D Shaded Textured Polygons, which never actually shaded in Ep2 anyways.)
4. Close Hammer entirely so your settings save.
5. Reopen Hammer and it should be working again.

After multiple install/uninstall/re-installs of steam, as well as the wasted hours with vid drivers, it all boiled down to that. I need to go out now, and find a dog to kick....

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i eat paint

Didn't work for me...
This let me start a new workable file, but i still can't open all my other files.
Off the the ungodly huge steam forms i go...

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Reality has become a commodity.

Boy I had the same problem for a little while, but I figured it out eventually after deleting and reinstalling my Source SDK. In deed, it was the "3d texture Shaded" mode that was keeping me from accessing my .vmf's. Upon loading a blank map, changing the 3d view settings, and then loading a saved .vmf, everything worked for me.

I figured this before, because since the Source SDK 2007 version, I hadn't been able to run in shaded textured mode, so I figured that was the last desperate act for me. I would have followed suit Fishy, with deleting Steam and all, if that didn't work, but thank god it did. Hopefully someone finds all this quite helpful.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

The sad part is if engines hadn't 'advanced' to the point of requiring models for every goddamn detail in the map this would have never happened, and Fishy would not be on the edge of a psychotic break

I think I might write a small article explaining this topic. A lot of people complain about it and it's getting a bit annoying (though there are some things developers could do to make it easier).

None of this, of course, is an excuse for poor development practices (which obviously happened considering the solution to the problem)

I'm glad you found your solution.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Please do, because ever since KFS went off to work in the real world I've had nobody to argue with in the fight for fps mapping luddism. :biggrin:

Didn't work for me...
This let me start a new workable file, but i still can't open all my other files.
Off the the ungodly huge steam forms i go...

Ok, never mind. I tried it again only this time i hit the save view button. It worked. (probably should have realized that in the first place...) Thanks Fishy. :smile:

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Reality has become a commodity.

Let it out, fishy, I know what it feels like. Kick those dogs.

About the props:

Considering that many, many props are just simple handrails, tables or lighting props that just consist of a cylinder or two with a basic material texture onto it, I don't see why a simple "prop editor" function wasn't integrated into Hammer. Or more engine editors in general.

Such an editor could be as simple as an option to disable the grid without fear of compile crashes, a proper material editor and and a way to handle the result as something like a more detailed prefab.

Do any of the newer editors (U3, Crysis) have something like this? I couldn't check yet. It seems so convenient.

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Why snark works.

I've just realised that valve have totally screwed over tf2, as far as innovative gameplay is concerned. I wanted to make a map that had beer, pizza, and a small gramaphone. Each of these were to act like flags, and capturing all three won the round, triggering a party for the winners. This was perfectly possible in tfc, but now there's no option to use anything other than the stupid intel briefcase as the flag model. I'm really disappointed with their short-sightedness on this one. :sad:

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i eat paint

@reaper47: UnrealEd (at least UEd3 (for UE2 (that gets confusing))) has a function like that, I never used it much though, it's not very flexible. It consists of a menu option that turns selected world brushes into a mesh. The triangulation can get ugly, and it's difficult to control the number of points for vertex lighting as one could in a 3D modeling app. It's sometimes useful for things like light fixtures and other little deco meshes, a quick way to take advantage of mesh instancing.

It would be nice though to not have to switch applications and fiddle with importing the end product. Also if you could create a mesh with traditional polygon modeling tools directly in the editor window where it's eventually going to end up, that would be real nice.

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o

Nickel and i have been having problems too, i can't even create a brush for the ep2 engine games

fishy said:
I've just realised that valve have totally screwed over tf2, as far as innovative gameplay is concerned. I wanted to make a map that had beer, pizza, and a small gramaphone. Each of these were to act like flags, and capturing all three won the round, triggering a party for the winners. This was perfectly possible in tfc, but now there's no option to use anything other than the stupid intel briefcase as the flag model. I'm really disappointed with their short-sightedness on this one. :sad:

Not really surprising. I would be shocked if you could even have three or four team maps in TF2 as well. Always seems like the small fringe things that aren't used very often but can be very cool when used by creative people get tossed by the wayside.

I think that, with some trickery, a map can use a different model. How about creating a custom model, giving it the exact same name as the briefcase, and compiling it into the .bsp? Perhaps with several versions for bodyparts, which can likely be controlled with some entity properties... I think that should work, yeah. I once tried a custom combine model, compiled it into a map and removed it from the models folder. HL2 had normal combines, my map had a custom one.

Remember, we had to do a lot of trickery in HL to get something creative done, too... :smile:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Capt, that would be ok if it was only one custom model that was involved, but you need at least beer, pizza and music for a party.

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i eat paint

and sexy bitches!!!

I know you want multiple different models, and that's where I suggested using body parts/versions for, because I assume you can somehow select these through entity properties, but I admit, that's something I haven't tested.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Bodypart versions? Is that a SP thing, so all the npc's dont look the same? Afaik, there's nothing like that in tf2.

One of the servers that I play on had a plugin running over the holidays, where every player had a party hat model attached to their head, so carrying models must be possible. I'm just too busy moaning to go and find out how. :razz: However it's done, I doubt that it will be as easy to as using the old item_tfgoal.

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i eat paint