Hammer Feature Requests

Features

Brush Construction

• Add a "pivot" point for rotation, like UED.
• Ability to move tool handles in the 3D view. In particular, resize brushes, move entities, etc. (Maybe with axis constraints, to deal with 2D => 3D spatial translation? [Perhaps something similar to the gizmo-style handles in 3dsmax?])
• A ruler feature to measure the distance (in units and real world units) and angle between two or more points.

Displacements

• Implementation of variable falloff on displacement tools
• Displacement verticies editable or viewable in orthographic views.
• In the terrain menu, when painting geometry, buttons would be much easier than a drop down menu for choosing x,y or z. This requires less clicking and would especially make it easier to switch from x to y when moving things at an angle.
• Painting geometry becomes troublesome when the viewing angle you need to see what you're doing is an angle that puts several verts in the path of your cursor. A solution for this would be a hotkey that, when held, locks onto the vert the cursor is currently on. This would prevent moving unseen vertices, unknowingly.
  • This is already in hammer, hold down shift and paint geometry - Dredfurst

Texturing and Materials

• Ability to Copy material name and path from Texture browser.
• Repair the "Apply All" function in the Face Edit sheet; it currently won't apply scale or rotation values.
• Icon in Texture browser to indicate custom material.
  • Possibly an icon to differentiate between the location of the material, either in a GCF or in the game folders?
• Proper material folder filtering exclusion.
• Ability to view the different channels of a material seperately. (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha, it's normal/bump, and specular map)
• Ability to type in and retain a texture scale of 3 or 4 decimal places. This would allow scrolling the x or y of a texture after choosing to "fit."
• Ability to rescale the lightmap grid size of all faces in the map by a relative multiplier.
  • Also to set the lightmap grid size for all faces in the map to a specified value.

Models and Props

Model Browser

• A 'model browser' containing a search field to search for models. If not, at least a 'model search' feature in the model viewer would be nice.
• A model browser similiar to the material browser. This would avoid needing to know what folder a model is in to find it. The jpg's would need to be rendered when the model was processed rather than the modeller having to create and save a jpg. Dimensions of the model, polycount, and texture size would be helpful. Checkboxes could be selected for static props, dynamic props, etc.

General

• Ability to see prop wireframes in the 2D views, not just bounding boxes.
• Allow the sequence(integer) keyvalue to be set by a dropdown...this would be useful for ragdoll initial position...it'd also be useful to have the first frame of the sequence show up for ragdolls.
• Ability to have models with a set animation in the editor, which would show even if the editor is restarted (example: in the model tab for npc_alyx, scroll through the list to Idle01, restart the editor, and shes still in Idle01)
• Option to set the distance at which a model turns into a yellow box in the editor 3d view.

General Functionality

• Drag and drop of map files onto Hammer, to open
• Ability to 'play' the map while in hammer.
• Ability to see func_monitor previews.
• This goes into the 'going beyond hammer' but make hammer more like UED, in that hammer could be turned into more of an IDE than just a level editor.
• Windows Scripting Host support with Hammer functions and objects addressable. Macro menu to host shortcuts to script files.
• Simple lighting preview in 3D view
• Run the compile tools in seperate processes or threads than the hammer GUI, and add a "Cancel" button to cancel the compilation process.
• Bookmarks bound to keys (e.g. numberpad) to jump to different areas of a map.
• Have shift+z maximize the viewport that the pointer is over, not the "current viewport".
• All tools in Hammer should be capable of remembering their state. Quite a few tools are missing this functionality at present:
  • Option for compile window to retain last known screen position and size.
  • Autosew does not remember and display it's state correctly

Entitys

• A graphical view of entities and their I/O connections as a flowchart could be helpful for debugging...
• ...or a database-like view of entities, allowing the user to view and edit many entities at once.
• Categorize entities, so instead of browsing from a single list of all entities, instead have a dropdown list of categories (or perhaps a filter, like the material browser) and then show a list of entities matching the filter or category.
• Cubemap entities whose range can be specified by a volume so that one cubmap can be used in a wide room and avoid conflict with cubemaps in rooms above or below.
  • Could be done by automatically "selecting" the faces the cubemap is for by selecting all the faces inside the volume. No engine modification needed.

Groups and Visgroups

• Automatically hide and show items placed or deleted from and in VisGroups
• More intuative on-the-fly visgrouping. i.e. Ability to select multiple brushes and entities, right-click, select "Show only selected entities and brushes", then when you're done working, right-click again and select "Show all entities and brushes".
  • Maybe something on the lines of 3ds max's "Isolate" command?

Miscellaneous

• Updated HL2 FGD (some entities that are used in the sample maps aren't in the HL2 FGD, info_light_relative for example)

Bugs

• Hammer <-> HL2 compatibility (able to run both simultaneously without any problems)
  • On this line of thought - Fix up the wc_ commands and developer environment ingame for HL2 <-> Hammer compatibility?

• Long file names can't be seen in Face Edit dialog.
• Face Edit dialog loses focus when cursor moves off the dialog.
• Hammer crashes if you startup a game without minimizing it and then reopening it before the game opens.
• Point At... button for angle keyvalues only set "angles" keyvalue.
• Occasionally the editor closes without warning or error.
• Editor becomes unstable and/or crashes on a fairly regular basis, often when adjusting overlays, deleting or working with move or keyframe ropes, when moving large amounts of brushes or entities, or doing large amounts of displacement modification.
• 3D view black models issue fix (failing to draw model textures because of video card limitations)
• Painting alpha values across multiple terrain brushes sometimes will not paint one of the selected brushes even though the points are lined up and sewn.

Dialog redesign proposals

• 

  Model Dialog by Cryovat

I think thumbnails would still be good—ts2do ^(talk) 18:09, 12 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Me too, but they should be for every model then (I'm looking at CS:S and DOD here), or have a more automated process for taking them, as I suspect VALVe has. Any way to take shots automatically with MV in a batch file or something? --RabidMonkey 18:57, 12 Oct 2005 (PDT)

The thumbnails fail to give a fair representation of what the model looks like, or the scale. Some kind of integration with HLMV would seem to be the best proposal here. --PiMuRho 08:00, 13 Oct 2005 (PDT)

• 

  Model Dialog by Cryovat

Upon further consideration, the thumbnail view is nice and it's not something I'd want to lose. I made this alternative to marry my old proposal with it, applying a three-pane approach. Thank you for the feedback! --Cryovat 16:13, 13 Oct 2005 (GMT+1)

Yes...what's this skin size thing though?? a model can use multiple materials—ts2do ^(talk) 11:27, 13 Oct 2005 (PDT)