Valve Hammer Editor

The Hammer Editor (formerly Worldcraft ) from Valve is a level editor to create their own scenarios ( maps) for the first-person shooter Half-Life and its mods ( including the famous online shooter Counter- Strike ) and in a newer version of Half -Life 2 or games that use the source engine developed by Valve.

Thanks to the ease of use of handling even for less experienced users is relatively easy to learn. The internet remains a major mapping scene, which offers tutorials, textures, prefabricated elements, known as prefabs and of course a large number of ready-made maps. The demands on the mappers are here very large and one for fun and good visual design is usually the prerequisite that the map had acquired a certain reputation.

History

The programmer Ben Morris, known by the development of the "Doom Construction Kit " a level editor for Doom, developed in 1996 a level editor for Quake. Originally, the Editor should carry the name of " The Forge ", however, since there already was a Levelditor with this name, Morris called the editor " Worldcraft ". After a free beta level editor Morris published on 3 December 1996 the paid full version of World Craft. For a price of $ 34.95, the full version of the editor and future updates you could secure. The editor was sent to the buyers on a CD by post.

On July 14, 1997 Valve Software bought the rights to the Worldcraft editor and put Ben Morris and for the development of Half-Life. After the release of Quake 2 version 1.6 of the editor was published on 18 December 1997 support for Quake 2 and witches 2

Ben Morris left on 6 March 1998 Valve Software.

Version 2 of Worldcraft editor was published on April 9, 1999 by Valve. He was free, but only worked with Half-Life.

For version 3.3 of the World Craft Editor, the editor was a facelift donated. In 2002, Valve released version 3.4 of the editor and renamed it " Valve Hammer Editor". On April 18, appeared with Beta version 3.5 the latest version of the hammer that is compatible with the Goldscource engine. The beta version 3.5 was published only as an update to version 3.4 of the Hammer editor.

On November 5, was published in 2004 version 4 of the Hammer editor for Half-Life 2 Gradually came Updates to the editor, and support for other games and on the Source Engine based mods.

Basics

Maps consist of two components: Brushes and entities:

• Brushes are the simplest geometric objects and form the basic architecture of each map (walls, floors, etc. ).
• Entities are used for everything else ( light sources, starting points for the player, sound effects, settings that determine the course of play, as well as detailed or moving objects, which can not be represented by Brushes )

While it is used in other level editors, such as the UnrealEd, a method to cut out at the premises of a quasi infinite mass, used the Hammer Editor, a system in which the Brushes in a completely empty room ( engl. void) are placed. However, since the interior of the map must be fully sealed from the space surrounding it, this often leads to problems when compiling (English leak ';' leak).

As measures of length World Units are used as a unit, this corresponds to approximately one inch. They are, as usual in the digital world, expressed in binary steps (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, ...). A character in the game is approximately 72 (64 8) units in size. An average wall is 128 units high. At this height will fit most textures ( flat images, such as that of a brick wall which can be projected on Brushes to give them structure) perfectly to the wall size. Textures in Half-Life usually 128 × 128 pixels in size - a texel, that is one pixel of a texture corresponds to a World Unit. In Half-Life 2 and the Source Engine sharper textures are used, the resolution is usually 512 × 512 pixels ( 4 pixels per unit).

Compile

The. Vmf ( Valve Map File ) files that can be edited in the Hammer Editor, differ from the. Bsp (Binary Space Partition) files that are later read by the game. The process can be converted into the. Vmf files in. Bsp files, ie compiling and must be done before the map can be loaded in the game.

Hammer automatically leads to three external programs ( vbsp.exe, vvis.exe and vrad.exe ) successively perform the following tasks and write the result into the bsp file.:

• Vbsp.exe determines which polygons are seen later in the game, and cuts off all the excess areas from the map. This only works correctly when the map is completely sealed, so no gaps (English leaks ) arise which make it impossible for outside and inside the map to distinguish. Even the sky is sealed by brushes with a special skybox texture. The result is a fully optimized, " hollowed out " geometry whose outer walls are like thin egg shells and create the impression architecturally sound only from the inside.
• Vvis.exe to check which parts of the map are visible to each other, so that as little geometry must be calculated later in the game. This is often - if the map is not optimized - the most computation-intensive and longest part of the compile process. This process can drastically shorten but by. Brushes, of which one anyway know that they bring no speed advantage by Visblocking, or just simply too small, assigns a detail function Vvis.exe then simply ignores the Detailbrushes and does not calculate this. So Compilezeiten can be reduced by 3 hours at less than 5 minutes. Has a map gaps, vvis.exe can not be executed.
• Vrad.exe used radiosity to natural-looking light and shadow effects to be calculated. The lighting data is stored in low resolution in the. Bsp file. The lighting effects can not be calculated in real time and are therefore not visible in the editor because of today's hardware limits.

This process is extremely complex and can, depending on the size of the map and the speed of the computer used to take several hours to complete. Poorly optimized maps can slow down the compile process even further or even cause a system crash. The task of the mapper is but basically just to edit too complex or small piece Brush architecture to Detailbrushes so that Kompilierprogramme when structuring the map geometry have no problems.

Through a small tool ( Pjs_GUI - your compiler ) it is possible that a map without the editor can be compiled. Thus, the computation time is reduced for each step, thereby achieving a faster result.