With Source 2 no doubt JUST around the next corner, any day now… definitely…
Let’s reflect on what mappers for Counter Strike have had to put up with until now!
Hammer is the default editor in which all maps are made. I have been using it for
almost 18 years, and it’s absolutely horrible. Hence why ficool2 saw the need to create Hammer++.
Notice it’s not just one +, but 2- to indicate just HOW MUCH better it is. Kind
of like how Notepad++. Hammer++ contains all sorts of meaningful improvements,
but many of them boil down to being able to do things in real-time in the editor
instead of having to wait to see how it looks in-game. And that is a game-changer. Literally.
In this video, if you’re a mapper then you’ll be blown away by the features that Hammer++ contains-
just download it for free right now, and majorly improve your mapping experience.
And, if you don’t map then you might not be interested in Hammer++’s features, but you’ll be
horrified by what wasn’t already a thing – and by the end of this video, you’ll have a much greater
respect for the abuse and torment that mappers have had to put up with for the last few decades.
Most important of all the changes Hammer++ brings to the table, is the realtime lighting. Picture
the scene: you’ve put a sun in your level, and you want to see how the shadows will
look. But to do this, you first have to RENDER the map, then load the game up,
and load your map up in there to see what it looks like. Rendering a map takes time, and it gets
longer and longer as your map gets bigger. By the end it can take hours for a full-map render. And
then you have to load it up in-game, then flick between that and the editor to make changes to it.
But Hammer++ somehow lets you view the lighting, in real-time!
For most of you, it’s probably going to come as more of a surprise to learn that mappers
couldn’t see what their maps would look like using Hammer. And that’s true- they don’t
know where the shadows will be, nor how brightly lit corners are. Not until the map is RENDERED,
and then loaded up in-game. This doesn’t just take lots of time to do, but it’s also fiddly
when you’re working on your map in Hammer, and are having to alt-tab between that and the game to see
what’s going on. Sure, with experience, you learn roughly how a map will look with lighting. Yes,
we find ways of coping with as few map renders as possible, namely by making as many adjustments
to the lighting as we can before having to re-render our maps. But for mappers watching this,
this video could stop HERE, and they’d still be completely sold on the importance of switching to
Hammer++. This will, over-night, greatly increase the image quality in CS:GO maps, because mappers
will be able to take risks with their lighting and to experiment with things that they wouldn’t
DARE attempt if it took them 30 minutes every time to actually prreview how it would look.
Sure, the shadows shown here are lower-res than they’d be
in-game- no realtime shadowmap like CS:GO has or anything like that. But… so WHAT? This is a good
enough preview for all of the things that you’d need to preview a map for- it’s good enough
to line up your sun’s angles with the skybox, to experiment with different shades of ambient light,
or to find out where’s best to place a light in a room to get awesome looking shadows.
There are many must-have features in Hammer++, yet this is still the ‘most’ essential. And I’m
not just faking excitement here; this really is as big a leap for mappers as… switching to
Source 2 would be. What a time to be alive. It’s actually made me realise that Hammer’s
unfriendly lighting and just how long it takes to iterate on a level is a big
reason why I haven’t made a proper map since 2014. But as much as I want to spend all day
shoving lights where the sun don’t shine, we must move onto other Hammer++ features.
Non-mappers among you will be surprised to hear that Hammer doesn’t let you see how fog will look
in your level; you had to pick some values, render the map, load it up and to see if it looked okay.
There was a way around this, though- you can use the ‘fogui’ console command on ANY map,
and it’ll give you freedom to adjust the colour and distances of the fog in real-time, so it’s
just a matter of finding the settings which look best, and then copy-pasting those values back
into the fog entity in Hammer. But again, Hammer++ goes one better by just… letting you see the fog.
Another improvement is to the 2D skybox. Every sky has a texture on it.
But Hammer made things difficult by only showing you this blue placeholder texture. So again,
Hammer++ does the obvious thing by letting you switch that for how the skybox will actually look.
Again, this is very obviously a good thing. A bigger deal though, is the ability to preview
the 3D skybox! That’s the stuff that’s visible in the background of a Counter-Strike level,
but isn’t really there because if you fly into it, it’ll disappear. Somewhere in the map you’ll
find a miniature model of this stuff. It’s a clever way of making things that are too big
to fit in the level normally (Like the Citadel from Half Life 2, for example), and it helps you
to optimise the map – I don’t want to confuse you by explaining this too much, but it means
that you can make outdoor parts of your map behave like indoor rooms, but you can still
have those impressive-looking bits poking up into the sky by putting them in the 3D skybox instead.
But how do you line this miniature version of the map up with the level itself? Well,
traditionally you use maths and entity positions, and check you got it right in-game. But Hammer++
makes it much easier by just showing you how it’ll look, so while you can still use maths
and entity positions, you’ll know instantly if something is wrong with them. Thanks, Hammer++.
You can also see rope physics done in real-time. This is more of a fun feature than it is anything
else, as Hammer would already show you how slack the rope is, which is the important
bit. But Hammer++ improves on this by also calculating the subdivisions, which is how
many segments the rope is made up from, which is what determines how smooth the rope will look.
It also lets you preview different thicknesses and material types.
So it has its uses, since it more closely represents how the ropes will look in-game,
but the important thing is that it’s a lot more FUN for mappers to play about with these ropes,
so expect to see more of them in maps made using Hammer++ for this one reason alone.
And then we get to particle effects, which I will admit: I know very little about. Sure,
I steal some from existing maps when I think they look cool. But I’ve never
bothered using new ones before, because there is no easy way to see what they’ll look like.
I’d have to find the names of them, to put them in my map, to render the level and THEN
I’d get to see whether they look cool or suitable or not. And because of that, I haven’t bothered.
But you know how you can browse all the textures in Hammer and choose the ones you want to use?
Wouldn’t it make sense if you could view particle effects in the same
easy sort of way? Hammer++ does this… obviously. When they’re all presented in front of me like
this, I can’t wait to add them to my level! Just look at all of them! All sitting there,
waiting to be used in cool ways. These things have all existed for years- the
only thing that was stopping me was the time and effort. But apparently, that’s all it takes.
What a revelation for them all to be listed like this.
This made me a bit paranoid that I wasn’t aware of a similar feature in the Hammer editor.
So I went and looked up tutorials on particle systems just to check I wasn’t missing out on
something obvious. I mean, SURELY Hammer has a way of showing what the particles will look like,
in it somewhere? It just makes SO MUCH SENSE for them to be shown as they’ll look in game!
…but no.
There ARE ways of previewing them in certain Source-based games,
but it’s not easy. And certainly not like this.
A lot of the things that Hammer++ does, isn’t to add a new feature, but simply to
make an existing one easier to use. Being able to place things in your level is kind of important.
It’s what levels are made of and stuff. In Hammer, you drag blocks out in the 2D view,
or place props in the 3D one but then have to use the 2D viewports to move them to where you want
them to be. Or X, but it’s shit and only relative to your viewport. It doesn’t make much sense. But
Hammer++ improves this in several ways- firstly, it lets you manipulate stuff in the 3D view. Just
like Source 2 does… and just like every other level editor ever made, ever. If I’m honest,
I don’t find it much easier than manipulating it around in the 2D views, but then… I do have 18
years of experience with that, compared with a few hours with the 3D method.
But… what if you need to place lots and lots of props down at once? Like if you need to decorate
a hill with dozens of shrubs and bushes?! This is where the Sprinkle Tool comes in
handy! This highly advanced tool ‘sprinkles’ a load of similar props in an area all at once,
all with slight variations to their design and rotation. You may be familiar with this tool,
since again, it already exists in every other map editor ever made. It’s just that,
with Hammer, this tool isn’t listed down the side of the screen where all of the other tools are. It
was hidden away in this menu system here! So while Hammer++ doesn’t add it to the engine, it does at
least put it with the others, making it clear that the tool exists. But it still requires you
configure a txt file with all of the prop settings before you can use it. So I probably still won’t.
But at least, now I know it’s there if I need it! Another way Hammer++ helps you to place things in
your level is to provide some tools to ensure that they’re not left floating slightly off the ground,
which can easily happen when you’re placing hundreds of props about a level you started
work on 3 months ago but are now starting to regret and kind of just want to get onto
the next one which you promise you’ll do better on and won’t get lazy with.
This tool here will automatically place everything selected down to ground level,
and to align it with whatever angle the slope is that it’s sitting on.
But even cooler than that is the PHYSICS tool! This
-rather predictably- applies physics to everything you have selected. And I mean EVERYTHING! So try
not to have literally the whole map selected at the time like I did the first time I used it.
While this simulation is running, you can freely select and drag stuff about,
which makes Source double up as a very capable (and FUN) physics sandbox simulator.
I figured this sort of feature would have limited use-cases for mappers. I mean, how many times do
you find yourself in need of simulating collapsed brick structures and the like? As it so happens,
it might be that I’m approaching this from the wrong direction. Maybe existing maps don’t have
many collapsed structures because it’s hard to do this sort of thing without a physics tool,
and now that we have it, it’ll encourage mappers to place MORE collapsed structures
about their levels, because it’s fun to do! I won’t say who I’ve spoken to about this,
but I can say that there are some big mappers out there who love this physics feature. Hammer++
will result in better maps, not only because it adds new features, and not only because it makes
existing ones more accessible, but also because it makes mapping more fun! Who doesn’t love physics?
In-game
You can make a sphere in Hammer. But don’t resize it! Whatever you do,
or you risk the coordinates risk falling down a black hole between the grid that Hammer is
based on! …but even if you don’t resize it, spheres have a tendency to degrade over time.
Their seams will split open, and you’ll eventually get an error when you boot
the map up, and the sphere will cease to exist. In short: while Valve can’t count,
Hammer can’t remember numbers after the decimal place- which has caused untold
numbers of problems for me in the past, even when I think I’ve done everything I can to avoid them.
But never fear! Because Hammer++ stores stuff beyond the decimal place.
What a simple solution.
The model viewer has been improved,
the sound previews now support rare and exotic file formats like… mp3.
And there’s a lot more to Hammer++ than that; every feature mentioned makes me think… yeah,
that makes sense, or it gives me horrible flashbacks to a moment where I could really
have done with it about 10 years ago. When you look at the community
surrounding Counter-Strike today, and at the wonderful maps and content generated for it,
just remember: all this has been made DESPITE the Source engine, and despite the Hammer editor.
‘Achieved with SORSE’ *splat*
Mappers should be AS excited about Source 2 as the players are- if not more so! For getting a new
engine and editor is probably the best chance we have of Valve finally fixing and modernizing the
modding tools for Counter-Strike. But for Source 1, Hammer++ is here for us, and it is bloody good.
Too good! So good that I can’t help but take it for granted. It just WORKS. It’s been brought
up to a standard that doesn’t just help today’s mappers, but would have greatly
helped VALVE to develop THEIR games in the first place! You’d think they, of all people,
would want their mapping program to work. But it’s taken the work of ficool2 to finally finish
the work on Hammer that a multi-billion dollar company started. And he should be proud of what
he’s done- for he’s finally made it into the editor it should have been in the first place.
Valve pls fix.