HL2 SDK soon

Taken from PHL

<A name=PQN478375>[size=16]New SDK Information <B class=comments></B>
[size=40]11/4/2004 15:33 PST | Half-Life 2 Editing | by [url=mailto:darkdruid@planethalflife.com][u][color=#0000ff]DarkDruid[/u][/url] [/size][/color]
In the last steam update a file was included that displays what all will be in the SDK for Half-Life 2. Here it is:

Source Software Developer's Kit

The Source SDK is a set of tools and resources used to create custom content, modifications to existing games, or even completely new games using Source engine technology. Anyone can download and try the SDK, but please note that it is designed for advanced users.

Included:

• Hammer
• Half-Life Model Viewer
• Face Poser
• Scene Manager
• Various content compiling tools
• Documentation
• Source code and examples

For community support and an online knowledgebase, please visit the Valve Editing Resource Center (VERC). The SDK will be updated over time with new resources, source code, or examples. As with Steam games, these updates will be delivered by Steam automatically.

So, expect the SDK soon!!![/size]

/shudders at thought of Farkism taking over here

Great, I cant wait to get my hands on that SDK ^_^.

My precious..

'bout bloody time.

Jezpuh said:
My precious..

Exactly... one thing to rule them all...

Captain P said:

Jezpuh said:
My precious..

Exactly... one thing to rule them all...

LOL, hopefully it wont be out too late after HL2, me wants to start mapping......

I'd imagine they'll hold it back until the steam network calms down a bit after the initial HL2 release.

I'd hope they get it out prior to release...but thats wishful thinking.
I'm finding myself opening and closing steam every now and then today
in the vain hope that it might show itself on the games list.

well f**k me, the sdk is supposed to be released today at some time

:biggrin:

I believe it's been released now... Assuming you purchased HL2 via Steam. Bastards. :smile:

They're going to add support for QuArK aswell :biggrin: .

Campaignjunkie said:
I believe it's been released now... Assuming you purchased HL2 via Steam. Bastards. :smile:

hahaha sucker :razz:

i get to build geometry while you're going to go out and enjoy your friday night

I've loadad up VHE4, and sadly, I don't think i have enough RAM to actualy do anything with it. :sad:

Leperous said:
/shudders at thought of Farkism taking over here

(most who have viewed a comments thread on Fark would understand)

Yes it is availabe now.

http://www.steampowered.com/?area=news

That thing is a helluva lot more demanding than the older hammers -
even my 3200XP with 512mb of RAM struggles! At the moment the editor is
quite a bit more different than I had expected but it shouldn't take
too long to become accustomed to it. Everyone really ought to make
themselves some batch files as using the built in compiler and keeping
hammer open in the background will waste quite a lot of your system
resources I imagine!

only for HL2 buyers ? Lame. I want it now.

Could some one post some screens of the editor for the underprivileged non-steam lusers like me?

^^ YES ^^^ PLEASE^^^ THIS MAN ABOVE ME IS VERY RIGHT IN HIS THINKING^^^^ SCREENIES PLEASE^^^^

Yay!!! HL2 SDK...And a wave of new killboxes are brought into creation. wrought with damnation and pestilence.

Oh yeah, and if you remember me, you get a cookie.

From the CS.net forums:

Edge Damodred said:
Oh yeah, and if you remember me, you get a cookie.

I want one!

Still studying game design at Full Sail? (I think that was you)

HL2 < VHE2



:biggrin:

Sorry for filesize, but its kinda necessary to make any of it readable.



Hierarchical vis groups is going to be a very very useful feature :smile:

Whoever made the default hammer settings for compiling needs to be
slapped. They made the game executable point at the BSP executable, so
it reruns BSP again at the end of a compile again by default! I spent
ages trying to figure out why my lighting wasn't working before I came
across this wierd issue.

im still trying to figure them all out yet, but this version has some issues which have me somewhat perplexed......and its apparently a serious resources drainer.....ill report back asap......

Dr Brasso... :dodgy:

ReNo said:
That thing is a helluva lot more demanding than the older hammers - even my 3200XP with 512mb of RAM struggles! At the moment the editor is quite a bit more different than I had expected but it shouldn't take too long to become accustomed to it. Everyone really ought to make themselves some batch files as using the built in compiler and keeping hammer open in the background will waste quite a lot of your system resources I imagine!

this question is rapidly becoming moot, so i suppose its now safe to post it..

what is the differences between the taboo hammer and the final released?? does anyone have both and can say??

i have had the taboo practically since it was available, and it runs as smooth as 3.5 ever did.. why is the final version so resource demanding?? what did they do to it?

now, i have not played with it in a while.. these Xmas pcs are taking all my spare time, but i do remember the smoothness of it..

ReNo said:
That thing is a helluva lot more demanding than the older hammers - even my 3200XP with 512mb of RAM struggles!

Ahh crap!

/continues saving...

there is an outside chance that once you get the game, the editor will smooth out..

i have noticed that it relies a bit on the hl2 folder to draw its sources from.. without the game, the editor may be having to access things in another way to make it function until you get the game to help it along with.

that may or may not have made sense, but it sounded good while i was outside thinking it up :biggrin:

anywho's, the fact remains, my taboo hammer runs exactly like hammer 3.5 does..

maybe, its driver related?? whatever.. i suppose we will only be sure once the game is out.

I imagine its due to the textures as much as anything. There are a
whole lot of them loaded in by default (all the CS:S ones) and you need
to add materials folders to an exlusion list to have them NOT loaded,
as opposed to have them in a list to HAVE them loaded. As most of these
textures are 512x512, thats a whole lot of memory needed for these
textures. Of course I doubt these are all loaded by default, but
instead loaded when you view them in the texture browser or have them
used in the level, so they shouldn't hit performance all the time.

Also, as far as I know you need to run it through steam, which won't
help matters. I also tend to run CS:S in the background just now as I'm
compiling so frequently. I didn't do this originally though, and it
still ran very slowly. Strangely enough, performance has recently
seemed not so terrible.

I'm reading an article on "Creating Materials". You can bet when HL2 is released, the next thing I'm getting is the SDK :biggrin:

Maybe it would help to unpack the GCF file? I dono. I havn't tried it yet.

update......first off, reno is correct when he says it must run thru steam....groan...secondly,when you uninstall hammer 3.5, you either need to rename your wads folder (the one accessed by 3.5) or remove it altogether....apparently on the first setup of 4.0, it auto configures to the point of having to go thru and make sure all folders and side folders are appropriate....it searched out and loaded all my wads for tfc, dod, etc etc etc.....quite a few gigs of stuff there... im running a gig of mem, and after perfoming the above countermeasures, performance has improved, but not to the point where i think its optimized.....im still plugging away at it, so.......

to be continued..... :wink:

Dr Brasso.... :dodgy:

EDIT>> i see the squirrel is online......maybe a bit of input sensai?? :heee:

While it is true you need to be running steam to run hammer, you don't
need to run hammer through steam, if you get what I mean. You can go to
your sourcesdk/bin/hammer.exe, create a shortcut to it on your desktop,
and run hammer using that. It will just close if steam isn't running,
but its a quicker way to launch it than going through the "play games
-> sdk -> hammer" route.

I've just purchased HL2 Silver through steam.

Downloading SDK now ...

Don't look at me. I fiddled around for maybe 10 minutes last night and have tooled around the cobble map a bit this morning and have basically 0 interest in even trying to do anything with it.

I probably will eventually, but it's just as clunky as hammer and as time goes on, especially looking at these editor bits, I'm getting less and less impressed with Source as an engine, though I'm still hugely hyped about HL2 as a game.

KungFuSquirrel said:
Don't look at me. I fiddled around for maybe 10 minutes last night and have tooled around the cobble map a bit this morning and have basically 0 interest in even trying to do anything with it.

I probably will eventually, but it's just as clunky as hammer and as time goes on, especially looking at these editor bits, I'm getting less and less impressed with Source as an engine, though I'm still hugely hyped about HL2 as a game.

:O

I noticed there is no way he can get that dual screen editor layout you
wanted still Andrew, as the texture browser still steals the focus :sad:

Still, while you are right that it has problems, it also does
have a lot of improvements. Overlays are going to save the bother of
making thin brushes over the top of objects to achieve the same effect,
vis group hierarchies are, I would think, going to be tremendously
useful, and though I'm still trying to figure out how to make them,
displacement surfaces sound like a big time saver.

Reno: No, overlays won't. They're like decals, except easier to move around. There are no scaling options available, and if you look at the cobble sample map, the more detailed overlay stuff (like the grass/vine 'climbing' up the wall), it's a 1-unit thick func_illusionary with an alpha texture.

Displacement surfaces are useless. The painter rather sucks and there's no way to get a wireframe view of what you're creating - in any view other than 3d textured, it's a solid freakin' color that doesn't let you have the slightest clue what you're doing. It doesn't even show up as anything other than an entity bounding box in the editor, which is even more worthless.

Group heirarchies are nice, yes, but there's just so many things so poorly implemented in this I'm almost slackjawed. I expected only a small gain over Hammer 3.5, but I expected far better than this.

Two questions, if any of you can help-

How do you make the lightmap view actually work? Everythings just showing up as white/blue cubes. I assume theres some button somewheres to calculate the lightmaps, if this view does what I assume it does. But I'm not really sure.

Also, what's up with the "3D smooth" view? Can't seem to figgure that one out.

The lightmap view is simply showing lightmap coverage - the smaller the squares, the more lighting detail in the scene. This is set on a per-face basis in the texture application window. Meaning a ridiculously tedious step for lighting optimization.

3D Smooth highlights the smoothing groups you set on brushes, but I've yet to determine if it actually shows them in their smooth form. All it seems to do is highlight them.

Just messed around with displacement surfaces and I'm sad to see you
are correct, its quite horribly done. Will still come in useful, but
not as useful as I had hoped.

The overlay tool is great though - to scale you just scale the box in
the 2D views as you would a brush. You can then use the UV coordinates
in the properties to make the material repeat or only display a portion
or whatever. I don't see anything wrong with how it is managed
personally.

Well, glad to see I was wrong on the sizing, but it's still a square. Having to make hacked together series of brushes into a func_illusionary on the 1 unit grid for any sort of more complicated shape is just ridiculous. That practice should have died long ago. Same with this hint brush crap, though hopefully the implementation shown in the cobble map will finally dispel some of the notion that you HAVE to use just one hint face and the rest in skip. But I mean, come on, you've got freakin area portals so why not use them?? They give you far greater vis control than the toss in a brush and cross your fingers practice of hint brushes.

It doesn't have to be square, it can be rectangular or you can move the
vertices to make it any quadrilateral. Not particularly wonderful I
admit, but the point of overlays is to make a masked texture appear on
a surface without the need for more brushes really.

Strange that they have both area portals and hint brushes, I'd have
thought they would have dismissed hint textures now. Perhaps just in to
retain some backwards compatibility with HL1 maps that use them I
guess, makes porting a bit simpler.

ReNo said:
It doesn't have to be square, it can be rectangular or you can move the
vertices to make it any quadrilateral. Not particularly wonderful I
admit, but the point of overlays is to make a masked texture appear on
a surface without the need for more brushes really.

Yes, that's exactly the point. so why make a half-assed attempt at it? Look at the cobble .vmf file. The vine growth up the walls is the sort of thing that an overlay -should- be for, and it's a 1 unit thick func_illusionary made up of a bunch of brushes.

There's no reason for any hint brushes to exist alongside area portals. It'd be more efficient to tear them out and replace them all with portals (which would hardly take any time at all on a ported map), unless their portal system is worthless anyway, which would be extra disappointing.

And where the hell are wireframe model entity view in the grid views? All these hollow boxes is just ridiculous.

Also, gotta love the light fixtures in the cobble example. Select one and check out the giant cone o' doom spreading out to infinity outside the level. There's no reason you should have to deal with imprecision like that.

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

Here are some pics. These are from someone else. I won't get to touch the new editor till around Christmas.

i have never seen taskbars so full of s**t :eek:

next time you all start crying about no resources, or sluggish machines... shut up :razz:

also, i would like to point out that the HL2 textures, are not quite what we are used to.. the dirt textures for instance, they have plant life already in them... i saw some with waist high grass :smile:

oh KFS, how could you forsake us so

oh well, enjoy using a crappy engine that can make tons of really detailed, interesting and cool shapes within the confines of a hallway!

runs

Is it really that resource-intensive? Can weaker low-spec machines even
handle the editor at all (say, GF4 MX), without crashes or massive
slowdown? I'm curious.

... And geeze, KFS, calm down! It's just a map-editor! :smile: