Hey.
So, I'm putting a little effort into learning Hammer for the sake of making a map or two for Team Fortress 2. I played around with it tonight and did a basic 2 rooms connected with a hallway type of thing. It's not too hard to figure out after coming from Radiant but every little process requires 2 or 3 more steps. It's ridiculous.

I was wondering if anyone had any secret tips? I don't even know what I'm looking for here, just something that may make things more Radiant like, or even just faster to work with?

Thanks in advance.

I hear people moving from radiant based editors to hammer editors tend to commit suicide a lot.. the hammer editor is just as efficent as radiant editors in my opinion. The best way learned to map for cs/halflife is to just make the map in radiant and bring in the brush work into hammer and then add textures and entities.

doesn't radient make hl2 maps too? The standalone version I mean. Hammer is just valve's own editor they bought &U customized but it's still the same old map format i think, like doom 3/quake 4 is nearly the same as quake 2.

Look, I'm no level designer, so I don't know if my opinion counts....

I've used radiant/d3edit a few times in the past and it was quite frustrating. A lot of stuff was possible, but everything was difficult, control "felt" wrong... I'm not sure what it is, but it was always a painful experience to me to model anything on radiant. I really wanted to love the program, but I just couldn't. As a quick note, UnrealEd always felt the same for me.

Then I had to use Hammer a few months ago for some college assignments. I've never used it before, but to my surprise, after some little time getting used to it, the whole interface and modeling operation became very fluid. Maybe it was the fact that, save for a few advanced features like patch editing, you're just building blocks on the editor - Quake 1 style - or maybe because it had all the viewports by default - I'm too used to 3dsmax I guess - but I was able to build maps much faster and have them look pretty nice thanks to the compiled radiosity without much hassle.

So I don't have any good advice to give, I'm just of the opinion that once you adapt to it, it goes really smooth. So keep on trying...

If I were a level designer, I'd be making maps like mad for TF2 now. It desperately needs more "ctf" maps. :/

I havent mapped for hl2 but when I messed around with hl hammer I remember having to make 1 sided planes in stead of 6 sided brushes. I always thought thats the hammer editor was just noticibly more work to make a level than in radiant.

Having done big sp projects for both the d3/q4 engine and HL2 maybe I'd like to give my opinions.

IMO, the editors have both evolved into something that really fits the type of maps you're likely to make with them. D3edit is a dream for brushwork/patch editing which comes in handy if you want to do the really complex, detailed brushwork that the engine is capable of. HL2 doesn't really need that much so I never felt those tools were lacking. I think that Hammer has a lot of instability issues in it though which really killed me a lot when I worked with it. But I put up with it because of the map I wanted to make. The "scripting" in hammer is a freaking thing of beauty, in fact the whole sdk is a very complete package that's almost unrivaled for me.

In the end, I like both. I choose the engine to work with depending on the type of map I want to work with.

Now, I freaking love TF2 so I'm going to start up hammer in a while when I have some more time to do so (stupid making games for a living bs

) and see what I can do.

I used worldcraft/hammer for many years, and attempted to use radiant several times for quake 2 and quake 3 but it never clicked with me... Then Doom3 came along and I forced myself to change engine, HL2 wasn't out and I wanted to work with some cool new technology.

In a lot of my earlier posts here where people were talking about Hammer Vs D3Edit, I used to say that radiant was more technical to use and hammer was easier to pick up. Now that I have used D3edit for several years and swapped between multiple world building apps, I have to say that Hammer is very hard to go back to working with - for me, it really does feel like a step backwards and as such, I find it very hard to map with hammer now.

The reason I think people find hammer easier to use is that it works closer to the windows-app logic compared to radiant, which has different type of input than what you would expect in a standard windows app (in the case of being 100% new to the concept of world building tools and level design).

Because of TF2 on the horizon, I started to make maps for several HL2 mods, but none of them came to fruitation, it just seemed like such an effort to use Hammer compared to D3Edit... and for some reason I really felt the loss of patch support and disliked the in-accuracy of the displacement tool. With patches you have direct control over each individual vert, whereas the displacement tool has a paint-like interface. I can see the benifit of this for large areas, but its very frustrating to use on smaller details compared to the vertex accuracy of the patch mesh tool.

My view is exactly 180 from your topic title... about 2 years ago. Years and years ago when I first got into level editing I was using hammer editor for half-life. I got very comfortable using it, so when I tried to get into radiant stuff (Doom 3) I found it very difficult to switch. It was hard to grasp that you were always creating a new block every time you click dragged on the grid. But I got past it and eventually switched. Now I'd have to agree with you, I hate using the hammer editor, it does take like 3 steps just to create one block.

Though I wouldn't say one is necessarily "better" than the other, I'd say that hammer is more immediately user friendly and interface friendly, but that radiant is much more intuitive in terms of building, but that the interface is more difficult to use. Radiant is definitely NOT newbie friendly.

Personally I can build rooms about 2x quicker in radiant than I ever could in hammer, and I'd never go back to hammer unless I had to. Though the fact that anything associated with Doom3 has crappy documentation (especially the editor), has made it hard to learn all the neat little tricks radiant has to offer.

Gotta say I 100% share your views Paveway - its identicle to the way I progressed onto D3edit

I haven't touched hammer since mapping for TFC

hammer is more friendly looking, but not as quick as radiant. It felt at the time more mouse based than keyboard based. Scripting wise is was great back then too.

Radiant vs hammer is similar to milkshape VS blender. One is friendly looking & mouse driven, the other is keyboard driven & can look alien so it scares people off. Then you have to look at the complexity of the games that are made with each one.
Milkshape and hammer are ment for simple geometry. Blender & rad are for higher detailed stuff.
Radiant has been used for games with super hi tech looking levels and super detailed gothic maps. Hammer is based around a game in modern times where detail and geometry is quite simple.

My thing is trying to test a map that I've made in hammer. I get everything set up but I can not figure out how to get people to connect to my listen server to save my life. I wasted a whole day messing with router settings and issuing server commands just so a friend and I could test a stupid box map LOL. Eventually I said bah screw this. (Of course I'm all ears if someone knows the trick heh-heh) It just seemed ridiculous to me considering with Doom 3 you just clear one port and bam done.

Hey.
So, I'm putting a little effort into learning Hammer for the sake of making a map or two for Team Fortress 2. I played around with it tonight and did a basic 2 rooms connected with a hallway type of thing. It's not too hard to figure out after coming from Radiant but every little process requires 2 or 3 more steps. It's ridiculous.

I was wondering if anyone had any secret tips? I don't even know what I'm looking for here, just something that may make things more Radiant like, or even just faster to work with?

Thanks in advance.

I hear people moving from radiant based editors to hammer editors tend to commit suicide a lot.. the hammer editor is just as efficent as radiant editors in my opinion. The best way learned to map for cs/halflife is to just make the map in radiant and bring in the brush work into hammer and then add textures and entities.

doesn't radient make hl2 maps too? The standalone version I mean. Hammer is just valve's own editor they bought &U customized but it's still the same old map format i think, like doom 3/quake 4 is nearly the same as quake 2.

Look, I'm no level designer, so I don't know if my opinion counts....

I've used radiant/d3edit a few times in the past and it was quite frustrating. A lot of stuff was possible, but everything was difficult, control "felt" wrong... I'm not sure what it is, but it was always a painful experience to me to model anything on radiant. I really wanted to love the program, but I just couldn't. As a quick note, UnrealEd always felt the same for me.

Then I had to use Hammer a few months ago for some college assignments. I've never used it before, but to my surprise, after some little time getting used to it, the whole interface and modeling operation became very fluid. Maybe it was the fact that, save for a few advanced features like patch editing, you're just building blocks on the editor - Quake 1 style - or maybe because it had all the viewports by default - I'm too used to 3dsmax I guess - but I was able to build maps much faster and have them look pretty nice thanks to the compiled radiosity without much hassle.

So I don't have any good advice to give, I'm just of the opinion that once you adapt to it, it goes really smooth. So keep on trying...

If I were a level designer, I'd be making maps like mad for TF2 now. It desperately needs more "ctf" maps. :/

I havent mapped for hl2 but when I messed around with hl hammer I remember having to make 1 sided planes in stead of 6 sided brushes. I always thought thats the hammer editor was just noticibly more work to make a level than in radiant.

Having done big sp projects for both the d3/q4 engine and HL2 maybe I'd like to give my opinions.

IMO, the editors have both evolved into something that really fits the type of maps you're likely to make with them. D3edit is a dream for brushwork/patch editing which comes in handy if you want to do the really complex, detailed brushwork that the engine is capable of. HL2 doesn't really need that much so I never felt those tools were lacking. I think that Hammer has a lot of instability issues in it though which really killed me a lot when I worked with it. But I put up with it because of the map I wanted to make. The "scripting" in hammer is a freaking thing of beauty, in fact the whole sdk is a very complete package that's almost unrivaled for me.

In the end, I like both. I choose the engine to work with depending on the type of map I want to work with.

Now, I freaking love TF2 so I'm going to start up hammer in a while when I have some more time to do so (stupid making games for a living bs

) and see what I can do.

I used worldcraft/hammer for many years, and attempted to use radiant several times for quake 2 and quake 3 but it never clicked with me... Then Doom3 came along and I forced myself to change engine, HL2 wasn't out and I wanted to work with some cool new technology.

In a lot of my earlier posts here where people were talking about Hammer Vs D3Edit, I used to say that radiant was more technical to use and hammer was easier to pick up. Now that I have used D3edit for several years and swapped between multiple world building apps, I have to say that Hammer is very hard to go back to working with - for me, it really does feel like a step backwards and as such, I find it very hard to map with hammer now.

The reason I think people find hammer easier to use is that it works closer to the windows-app logic compared to radiant, which has different type of input than what you would expect in a standard windows app (in the case of being 100% new to the concept of world building tools and level design).

Because of TF2 on the horizon, I started to make maps for several HL2 mods, but none of them came to fruitation, it just seemed like such an effort to use Hammer compared to D3Edit... and for some reason I really felt the loss of patch support and disliked the in-accuracy of the displacement tool. With patches you have direct control over each individual vert, whereas the displacement tool has a paint-like interface. I can see the benifit of this for large areas, but its very frustrating to use on smaller details compared to the vertex accuracy of the patch mesh tool.

My view is exactly 180 from your topic title... about 2 years ago. Years and years ago when I first got into level editing I was using hammer editor for half-life. I got very comfortable using it, so when I tried to get into radiant stuff (Doom 3) I found it very difficult to switch. It was hard to grasp that you were always creating a new block every time you click dragged on the grid. But I got past it and eventually switched. Now I'd have to agree with you, I hate using the hammer editor, it does take like 3 steps just to create one block.

Though I wouldn't say one is necessarily "better" than the other, I'd say that hammer is more immediately user friendly and interface friendly, but that radiant is much more intuitive in terms of building, but that the interface is more difficult to use. Radiant is definitely NOT newbie friendly.

Personally I can build rooms about 2x quicker in radiant than I ever could in hammer, and I'd never go back to hammer unless I had to. Though the fact that anything associated with Doom3 has crappy documentation (especially the editor), has made it hard to learn all the neat little tricks radiant has to offer.

Gotta say I 100% share your views Paveway - its identicle to the way I progressed onto D3edit