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
• In the Displacement Paint Geometry window, if you have a non-integer in 'distance', or something greater than 256, you lose it if you touch the 'radius' slider. If you use displacements in the way I do, this can be very annoying.

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?
    • Maybe a small game icon from the Steam Games menu next to all materials that are being referenced from the GCF files, and which GCF in particular (HL2 icon for default Source GCFs, CS:S for Counter-strike: Source, etc.).
• 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)
• You can now change the texture scale and rotation by .0001 and it saves to vmf and works in-game, but when you reselect the face, Hammer only reports the scale and rotation to .01. Have Hammer report it to .0001. 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.
• When scaling a texture, have it lock at a pixel determined from previous texture shift and justifying. For example, if you had previously justified left, then shifted it over 10, the pixel that was then on the left side would be locked, and stay in that position if you then did a texture rescale.
• Now the mousewheel changes the texture scale by .10. Make it change it by .01, and ctrl + mousewheel change it by .10. ...or at least have some way to change the texture scale by .01 other than by manually typing it in.

• In the justify section of the material tab, have <fit> and ^fitv for when you want to fit the texture in one dimension but not the other.

Models and Props

Model Browser

• A model browser similiar to the material browser. Would include a search feature as well as a filter feature, like 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

• Optional ability to see prop wireframes in the 2D views, rather than 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 she's still in Idle01)

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.
  • Yes, on an X2 or another multi-cored system this would be EXCELLENT —Pon ^(talk) 04:31, 15 Oct 2005 (PDT)
    • You guys do realize you can always close Hammer while compiles are running and use a manual batch file or batch compiler instead? --RabidMonkey 00:29, 16 Oct 2005 (PDT)
• 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

Entities

• 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
• Ability to create your own "visgroup-groups" similar to the "Auto" group, but with custom visgroups "inside" it.
• 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?
• When undocked, it'd be nice if the visgroup window were resizeable, for working with multiple groups.
• Keep the current heirarchy state when adding/modifying visgroups. The dialog will lose which subgroups are minimized whenever they are modified.

Miscellaneous

• Updated HL2 FGD (some entities that are used in the sample maps aren't in the HL2 FGD, info_light_relative for example)
• Depth cue for 2D views, based on the 3D camera's location

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)

As stated, loading the models in their entirety would be too inefficient. Having a thumbnail combined with information on the model's unit size, materials, and default prop type (prop_static, prop_dynamic, etc) would be really helpful. --Bwmathis 14:24, 15 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Loading the actual models would be even less efficient than the thumbnail system! Anything like it would have to be an option, not default. --TomEdwards 09:01, 15 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)