Page Text: Titanfall 2
Source
This is a quick and dirty crash course for hammer, the editor for source engine games. In this tutorial I am going through hammer for Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It is aimed towards people who are little to no experience with hammer.
First out is the Source Engine. The editor for Source is called Hammer. Hammer and Source is pretty old by now but it’s an excellent engine where you as a level designer have all the power and the tools. The bad part is that since it is now old it will look old, no matter how gorgeous you make the lighting or the materials. The editor you will get for free if you have Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2, Team-Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The two latter ones are multiplayer only but still great if you want to produce a multiplayer level. Left 4 Dead is focused on coop and has its own set of challenges while Half-Life 2 is singleplayer only. So, if you want to do one of each to show your design skills in all the different areas you can do so with the same editor but for the different games and with the use of their assets.
Source is great because it is easy to use, easy to learn, hard to master and there is no editor out there that let a designer block out a level in such a rapid time. None. Another big favor for source is that since it’s old, there are a ton of available documentation and live communities that can help you out if you have problems. The editors also come with full AI, animations, textures, materials, sound and the ability to create your own mod, which is essentially your own game. Source is also built on exact dimensions of objects, making it a designers dream to use because everything is measured and built to standards. You can break these if you want but to your own risk and I wouldn’t recommend it if you are new. Veterans only!
The downside is, since it’s old, it can be slow to work with sometimes. All the cool and new, fancy stuff you get in modern editors it is lacking. Everything is built on the grid, which is great, but sometimes objects are not snapping to the grid or you will have to go down to a very small grid-size to align something and this can make you insane if you get it wrong too many times or something has moved. The lighting is not built in realtime, instead you will have to compile and bake the lighting, and then start the game, load up the level and run through it there to see the changes. The major drawback is that if you move a single object, the entire map will have to be recompiled which means that if you are several hours in on your level and move a chair, it can take hours to recompile the lighting to get the correct light on the new position for the chair. Life is hard I know. Apart from that, the editor can be prone to randomly crashing so be sure to save, save, save and please, do back-up your save files somewhere. I’ve had entire level files be corrupted and lost because of me not saving correctly. Back-up your files! And lastly, the scripting is entity based, meaning that the scripting you do is out in the game world. Instead of code-based, which is purely text in a separate file or visuals scripting, which are nodes in a network, this is a bit like connected nodes but out in the world, similar to objects. Not as bad as it sounds but it can be a hassle.
Designer’s rating