Talk:Valve Hammer Editor

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• 12:35, 2 April, 2024

Splitting the page

Right now the page is a really, really awful mess of information on three separate eras Hammers piled onto each other with random tidbits (like on Narbacular Drop) propped up amidst it at the very top.

For something so integral to GoldSrc and Source modding as Hammer of all things, it simply hurts to see now.

The infobox is simply wrong as it tries to tie three engines to one editor.

Over half of the article's size is taken up by version info (a purely historical information).

It is effectively useless as a source of information on any of the Hammers.

I propose splitting it into three separate pages, which I've drafted up. The idea is:

User:Cvoxalury/Valve_Hammer_Editor for the GoldSrc one. It lists its history briefly, and leads to either GoldSrc categories or TWHL, as VDC is mostly underdocumented in regards to GoldSrc. With hopes of expanding and correcting that.

The name of the article will stay (so, the contents of what I linked, will replace the current page), a couple redirects, like Hammer (GoldSrc) will be added.

User:Cvoxalury/Hammer for the Source 1 Hammer. It is the primary Hammer whereas VDC is concerned, owing to its time to creation and body of community work. So the categories that currently link to this article, will be changed to lead to that. Which I can handle.

User:Cvoxalury/Hammer_(Source 2) for Source 2 Hammer. The shortest and stubbiest article, because I don't work with it, and the section in this article is as stubby. I've seen more activity recently on Source 2 documentation front, so hopefully that'll change.

All these aren't meant to encompass the whole huge subject of working in Hammer. For that there's separate long established categories (well, for Source there are, at least). It is meant to provide clear info on what Hammer(s) is/are, how to start with it. The current page, again, just isn't doing it.

The formatting of these drafts isn't final (but the farther they stay from the pile of coloured boxes and text and plaques, the better). I advise against using the {{Leveleditors}} navbox in general. Naturally, each page will only need one of the tools navboxes. And so on.

P. S. Can the rest of the talk page be archived? I don't know how it's done. Cvoxalury (talk) 17:12, 20 July 2024 (PDT)

It seems a bit unintuitive for "Valve Hammer Editor" and "Hammer" to refer to two different versions of the same program, even if it is how Valve titled them. I'd go for "Hammer (GoldSrc)" for the former instead of just a redirect, especially considering Source 2 Hammer is already titled that way, although I suppose it's not a big deal if it's made clear at the top of the page.

It's also worth mentioning some entities which exist in both Source and GoldSrc (e.g. env_global) use a template called {{tabs}} to make it easy to navigate between them. I'm not particularly familiar with this template and it does seem to have a lot of fluff on the inside, but it might be worth considering for this.

Otherwise, I think the pages you've drafted up look good so far, and I support splitting up the Hammer article in this way. —Blixibon (talk) 20:13, 20 July 2024 (PDT)