So valve has released a beta version of the source sdk, with ep2 game code, to acces it, put -beta srcsdk0122 in the STEAM shortcut (not the sdk shortcut).

The update includes:
* Half-Life 2: Episode Two game source code.
* Removal of the need to use command-line parameters to access the Episode One-era tools or the new studiomdl and vmex.
* Hammer 3D Lighting Preview (including 3D ray-traced).
* scenes.image compiler for choreography creators.
* Various bug fixes.

More about it here

Yay says I.

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Boo f**king Hoo

Awesome.

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Aaron's Stuff

3D light preview you say? (head explodes)

I played around with it for a little while, the light preview is handy except for the fact that light_spots are the only entity with any affect, and they illuminate dimly in all directions in addition to the cone. I hope they fix it to include point lights and maybe even texlights (yeah right). Still better than nothing.

Raytraced preview, on the other hand, looks exactly the same as far as I can tell but runs very slowly and takes GBs of RAM.

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o

I find that the lighting previews are terribly dim, to the point that they are practically no use.

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i eat paint

* Two new lighting preview modes are available. 'Note:' 3D Ray-traced Lighting Preview can cause Hammer to run slowly for complicated maps.

3D f**king ray-traced lighting?!? Why is their Hammer lighting more high-tech than ingame now? (well, I can guess why, but still!)

I probably won't get to use it anytime soon. Anyone care to share a screenshot? I'd be interested in how it looks.

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Why snark works.

Ok now I get how the raytraced mode works, it's a separate window, and it shows point lights. Still no texlights though... from my uneducated view it seems it shouldn't be very difficult (parse lights.rad when starting Hammer). Fishy is right, its extremely dark (I thought the shaded view made it hard to see :razz: ) I'm guessing they'll up the gamma for the official release.

It's nice to finally see a lighting preview in Hammer though, I've been waiting patiently since the 'false start' in the update that added the (useless) shaded mode, changed the brush tool third axis behavior, added 3D view manipulator handles and changed the skew tool to almost exactly the same as grabbing an edge in vertex mode, thereby making it redundant and basically useless.
... /rant

One nifty thing I found is that you can preview attenuation (constant, linear, quadratic) but since the whole mode is wonky and inaccurate thats not all that useful. Still a little better than blindly guessing.

I was really hoping I'd be able to use it for all HL2 games though, not just orange box.

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o

O i love it. The first time i opened sdk sense the update steam crashes...

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Reality has become a commodity.

sounds nifty :smile: