Hammer Editor
The Hammer Editor (formerly Worldcraft ) of valve is a level editor to create your own game scenarios ( maps ) for the first-person shooter Half-Life and its mods (including the popular online shooter Counter-Strike ) and in a newer version of Half -Life 2 or games that use the Source Engine developed by Valve .
Thanks to the simple operation, handling is relatively easy to learn even for less experienced users. There is a large mapping scene on the Internet that offers tutorials, textures , prefabricated elements, so-called prefabs and of course a large number of ready-made maps. The demands on the mapper are very high here and a playful and visually good design is usually the prerequisite for the map to achieve a certain degree of awareness.
history
The programmer Ben Morris, known for developing the "Doom Construction Kit", a level editor for Doom, developed a level editor for Quake in 1996. Originally the editor was supposed to be called "The Forge", but since there was already a level editor with this name, Morris called the editor "Worldcraft". After a free beta phase of the level editor, Morris released the full version of the Worldcraft editor for a fee on December 3, 1996. For a price of $ 34.95 you could get the full version of the editor and future updates, the editor was mailed to buyers on CD.
On July 14, 1997, Valve Software bought the Worldcraft Editor rights and hired Ben Morris to develop Half-Life. After the release of Quake 2, version 1.6 of the editor appeared on December 18, 1997 with support for Quake 2 and Hexen 2. Ben Morris left Valve Software in early 1998 for personal reasons. Version 2 of the Worldcraft Editor was published by Valve on April 9, 1999, the editor was free, but only worked with Half-Life. For version 3.3 of the Worldcraft Editor, the editor has been given a facelift. In 2002 Valve released version 3.4 of the editor and renamed it "Valve Hammer Editor". On April 18th, Beta version 3.5 was the last version of the hammer that is compatible with the Goldscource Engine. The beta version 3.5 only appeared as an update to version 3.4 of the Hammer Editor.
Version 4.0 of the Hammer Editor for Half-Life 2 was released on November 3rd, 2004. Gradually there were updates for the editor and support for other games and mods based on the Source Engine.
Basics
Maps consist of two components: Brushes and Entities :
- Brushes are the simplest of geometric objects and form the basic architecture of any map (walls, floors, etc.).
- Entities are used for everything else (light sources, starting points for the player, sound effects, settings that determine the course of the game as well as more detailed or moving objects that cannot be represented by brushes )
While in other level editors , such as UnrealEd , a method is used in which rooms are virtually cut out of an infinite mass, the Hammer Editor uses a system in which the brushes are placed in a completely empty space ( void ) . However, since the interior of the Map in full by the him surrounding space must be sealed, this often leads to problems in compiling (Engl. Leak , leak) when the map by the creator was not sealed clean.
World units are used as a unit of length , whereby this corresponds to approximately one inch. As usual in the digital world, they are specified in binary steps (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, ...). A character in the game is approx. 72 (64 + 8) units. An average wall is 128 units high. At this height, most textures (flat images like that of a brick wall that can be projected onto brushes to add texture) will fit the wall size perfectly. In Half-Life, textures are mostly 128 × 128 pixels - one texel, i.e. one pixel of a texture, corresponds to one world unit . In Half-Life 2 or the Source Engine, sharper textures are used, the resolution is usually 512 × 512 pixels (4 pixels per unit).
Compile
The .vmf (Valve Map File) files that can be edited in Hammer Editor are different from the .bsp ( Binary Space Partition ) files that are later read by the game. The process of converting .vmf files to .bsp files is called compiling and must be performed before the map can be loaded into the game.
Hammer automatically runs three external programs (vbsp.exe, vvis.exe and vrad.exe), which perform the following tasks one after the other and write the result to the .bsp file:
- vbsp.exe determines which polygons can be seen later in the game and cuts all excess areas from the map. This works correctly only when the map is completely sealed, so there are no gaps (Engl. Leaks ) arise that make it impossible to distinguish outside and inside the map. Even the sky is sealed by brushes with a special skybox texture . The result is a completely optimized, "hollowed out" geometry, the outer walls of which appear as thin as eggshells and only give the impression of solid architecture from the inside.
- vvis.exe checks which parts of the map are visible to each other so that as little geometry as possible has to be calculated later in the game. If the map has not been optimized, this is often the longest and most computationally intensive part of the compilation process. However, this process can be shortened drastically by assigning a detail function to brushes that are known to have no speed advantage through visblocking or that are simply too small . Vvis.exe then simply ignores the detail brushes and does not calculate them. Compile times can be reduced from 3 hours to less than 5 minutes. If a map has gaps, vvis.exe cannot be executed.
- vrad.exe uses radiosity to calculate natural-looking light and shadow effects. The lighting data is saved in low resolution in the .bsp file. The lighting effects could not be calculated in real time because of the hardware limits at the time and are therefore not visible in the editor.
This process is extremely complex and can take several hours, depending on the size of the map and the speed of the computer you are using. Poorly optimized maps can slow down the compilation process even further or even lead to a system crash. The main task of the mapper is to edit the complex or small-scale brush architecture into detail brushes so that the compiler programs have no problems with structuring the map geometry.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Press Release - Valve acquires Worldcraft and welcomes Ben Morris and Marc Laidlaw to development team. In: bluesnews.com. Blue's News, July 14, 1997, accessed April 2, 2020 .
- ^ Valve Announces Worldcraft support for Quake 2. In: bluesnews.com. Blue's News, December 18, 1997, accessed April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ Blue's News - Feb 28 - Mar 6, 1998. In: bluesnews.com. Blue's News, March 6, 1998, accessed April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ WorldCraft 2.1 Released. In: bluesnews.com. Blue's News, April 9, 1999, accessed April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ HL2DM, Source SDK, Source Engine Update Released. In: steampowered.com. December 3, 2004, accessed April 4, 2020 .