Vgroup

Vgroup (Valve Auto VisGroup'er) is a tool for Source engine VMF map files. This tool can help you by grouping the map into VisGroups based on a grid, and by default disabling them so that you can enable them later after Hammer loaded the map. That way you can view single parts of the map. That gridsize has to be in range of 1024 and 4096 units. The tool was made for maps decompiled with Vmex.

Description

vGroup (Auto VisGroup'er) is a .vmf tool for Half-Life 2 games (HL2, HL2DM, CS:S, DoD:S, TF2).

You decompiled a map with VMEX? But your Hammer editor goes crazy every time you open the decompiled file? Your system load becomes very high every time you want to view the decompiled map and Hammer is not able to be used that way?

This tool can help you by grouping the map into VisGroups based on a grid, and by default disabling them so that you can enable them later after Hammer loaded the map. That way you can view single parts of the map. The gridsize has to be in range of 1024 and 4096 units.

Because Hammer is not able to handle more than 128 VisGroups, this tool only creates a maximum of 125 VisGroups, and that means that everything outside of the range (gridsize * -2) and (gridsize * 2) for x, y or z, is not put into a VisGroup and will be visible on load.

It does not require anything installed and can run under Windows 2000 and newer. (Maybe Windows 95 and newer, but that was not tested.)

You can either run the tool by just starting the file and it will ask you for a .vmf file and a grid size, or you can also run it on the command-line, or by moving the .vmf file on the vgroup.exe.

To run the tool from the command-line, invoke it with:

vgroup [mapname.vmf] [gridsize]

You can also drag&drop the .vmf file onto the vgroup.exe.

The download can be found here.

Changelog

Update v0.2 Build 230 15.11.2008

-Optimized the program again

Update v0.1a Build 220 03.01.2008

-Fixed: Invalid files were parsed and saved, so that the file was destroyed.

-Fixed: The backup was made before any checks on the file were made.

-Added: It does now also check for the correct bracket { } number.

See also

• VGROUP 0.2 - download mirrors for the latest version.