On Hammer Editor

[tau888]

I have been using Hammer Editor the past few weeks to work on a personal project of mine. And from my experience it is just a mess. I have gotten more used to it of course, but so many things about it just seem convoluted. You can't even use your mouse in the camera screen to transform objects, instead you must use this weird panel of 3 different grids to edit them. The sprinkler tool requires you to make some weird folder or something to select the model you want to use, I still don't entirely understand what that is all about.

Compared to other editors it definitely shows its age. It seems like Hammer doesn't really look different from when it was created, which was like decades ago. You could argue that this is because Source is 20 years old and they shouldn't have to update the editor for such an outdated system, but Source is still widely used in many games that countless people still play. All I ask is for more user friendly design and intuitiveness.

 Now that I am used to it though, it isn't THAT bad, but still. How did Valve make masterpieces such as Half-Life 2 on... this thing?

[verdronic2k]

Hammer *is* old and boy howdy it shows its age. I made a few maps in it last year and it certainly takes some getting used to. That being said, it looks like you're using vanilla Hammer, have you considered Hammer++? It doesn't solve everything you brought up, but it goes a long way in improving quality of life. Especially the frequency of crashes.

Good luck!

[tau888]

Oh yes, I have recently switched to Hammer++ a few days ago. It is a decent improvement and makes certain things easier, but it's still Hammer. The image I put was just an example of Hammer I found online, sorry for the confusion.

I hope that I get more comfortable with it as I use it more. For now I am just looking up tutorials to make everything, and I've got a pretty nice map going now with lighting, props and some other goodies like that. Both Hammer and Hammer++ get very frustrating when it comes to attempting to scale objects when they are rotated at certain angles though. It transforms relative to the world and not the object, so you end up getting a wonky stretched shape and it just really sucks. Other than that it's going pretty alright.

[DiffydaDude]

Honestly, I like hammer editor. When I got a grasp on it, it became really fun just making cool maps i thought of. The last map I worked on was a Backrooms style map which isn't done yet but even with how jank it can be, I still love it.