Level Design

Note:Most of the stuff here are placeholder taken from Half-Life: Alyx Workshop Tools for now. Not all pages are fully created yet.

Getting started with CS2's Hammer Editor

Todo: Replace & Move all links from "Game Name Workshop Tools" to "Source 2/Docs/", as long if the contents of the page itself applies to other Source 2 games.

Guides

References

List of CS2 Entities - List of Entities found in CS2.
List of CS2 Maps - List of CS2 Maps (work in progress).
List of CS2 Skyboxes - List of Skyboxes and their Light settings used in official CS2 maps.
List of CS2 Soundscapes - List of Soundscapes found in CS2.
Decompiled CS2 Maps - Decompiles of official CS2 Maps to be used for research.
Source 2 Tools Textures - List of Tools Textures in Source 2 games, useful if you're confused about what a given texture does.

External links

Source 2 Viewer - Formerly known as VRF; Is able to open VPKs, compiled vmaps and decompile compiled assets (including maps and materials).
RadGen - Also known as Jimwood's Radar Generator; A program that is capable of generating radars similarly to the way Valve maps are styled.

Hammer Minimum Specs

Hammer now leverages GPU-Accelerated raytracing to both preview and bake lighting for Counter-Strike 2 maps, drastically speeding up compile times, even on lower-end hardware. As such, a GPU capable of raytracing is now required for Hammer to be fully functional.

GPU Minimum Specs:

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 (or Quadro/Titan equivalent)
- Note:Although some GTX 10 and 16 cards do support GPU-Accelerated raytracing, Hammer doesn't support GPU-Accelerated raytracing because of a lack of RT cores.
AMD Radeon 6600 XT (or other RDNA 2 cards)
Intel Arc series (tested on Battlemage)

GPU Recommended Specs:

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti+ (or Quadro/Titan equivalent)
AMD Radeon 6800 XT+ (or other RDNA 2 cards)
Intel Arc series (tested on Battlemage only as of Jan 5th, 2025.)

Todo: ^{[ Deprecated]} It is still possible to use the old CPU compiler by moving around some files or adding -lightmapcpu to resourcecompiler's run parameters; document this (probably on a subpage).

Warning:The deprecated CPU lighting compiler does not support the new light types introduced in

, such as emissive materials!.

Hammer - Known issues

Bug:Since the Armory Update, a newer version of the Nvidia Studio driver may cause tool crashes when trying to preview lighting or compile a map using Path Tracing. If you are experiencing crashes, you can try the stable version of the driver: Nvidia Studio 561.09 (Tue Sep 17, 2024).

Confirm:RTX 50 series graphics card has been released, and it only support new driver. Is there any other workaround for these card, or whether if its not affected on RTX 50 series?

(tested in: Hammer (Map Editor) on January 20, 2025 with Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and Windows 10 22H2 (Pro)‎)

Bug:On some systems, running Counter-Strike 2 with Workshop Tools, will cause the memory usage to increase abnormally (memory leak).1

Workaround:Launch CS2 Workshop Tools by going to CS2's

bin\win64 directory and launch csgocfg.exe with -steam -retail -vulkan. However this will disable GPU Path Tracing option in Hammer.

(tested in: Hammer on 32GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and Windows 10 21H2 (LTSC). --leonidakarlach (talk) 23:25, 30 January 2025 (PST))