Author Topic: what program do YOU use?  (Read 4819 times)

I use torque constructor but i want to try a different program.. what others work nicely?

Hammer, but it's very inefficient for what it does. It's powerful, yes, but you have to have serious brainpower to figure it out.

Hammer, but it's very inefficient for what it does. It's powerful, yes, but you have to have serious brainpower to figure it out.
Not necessarily, it's extremely easy, along with torque constructor they're both equal to me.
I use torque constructor for my maps.

Not necessarily, it's extremely easy, along with torque constructor they're both equal to me.
I use torque constructor for my maps.
Really? Hammer doesn't make much sense to me for some reason.

Really? Hammer doesn't make much sense to me for some reason.
Odd, I find it easy as TC.

This post will be a little long because I've got a lot of comments on mapping in general, you can scroll down to the bottom for a summary though.

Hammer has a GUI straight out of 1995.

It's pretty similar to Quark, which will also do interiors and as well. In fact, Hammer and Quark are pretty much close cousins, both originally designed as editors for roughly the same games. Quark has been expanded over the years, it has a huge selection of games you can make maps for and you can actually make maps for Half-Life and Half-Life 2, although it's probably better to use Hammer for this.

Hammer used to be called Worldcraft, which you can also use to make interiors if you really feel like it as well.

Technically you aren't supposed to use Hammer or Worldcraft (I think it's in the EULA) to make maps for other games but Valve doesn't seem to care and if they did I think they'd just get a collective "go to hell" from the mapping community, and then everyone would keep on modeling. There's no way they can actually find out without looking over your shoulder while you're using it anyway. It's probably more of just a legal oddity than anything, they probably put in so if your computer explodes from an unofficial exporter they don't have to provide support or whatever. Just an interesting note.

Some people also use a program called GTK Radiant. What's-his-name who ran the scattered space clan forum used it.

You can also look on the Torque forums and see people using all sorts of programs, ranging from Blender to 3DS Max. You need to really know how to make a map though, because unlike GTK Radiant, Worldcraft, Quark, Hammer, Torque Constructor, etc (we'll group them all together and just call them bsp editors), normal modeling programs do not know what an invalid brush is and won't stop you from drawing ones. In other words, you will crash the exporter lots and have no idea why because it won't tell you why. I think 3DS Max actually has plugins for this though, and I believe Kaje once made an interior with 3DS Max.

I once drew an interior in autocad and exported it as a dwg, imported to sketchup, exported to vmf, imported in quark, exported to .map, imported in torque constructor, and exported to an interior. Using the sketchup route you can pretty much model in any program, but again, you have to make sure you are drawing valid brushes. This method will actually allow you to hop straight from a set of real blueprints into modeling, which is pretty cool. Surprisingly, despite being as real as you can get, real buildings don't necessarily make the best level geometry. Lots of rooms are dead ends in real life, guess how well that works in a deathmatch. Video game characters are also notoriously fat/giant and they will get wrapped up in geometry that's too complex. While real humans can slip through a 20 inches of space or less, fitting two characters in a doorway in a game is usually impossible.

You can pretty much use any bsp editor as long as you are willing to work with the map and get it working: a map straight out of Call of Duty won't import right into Blockland, you'll need to convert it to meet all of the Torque Engine's rules. But it's possible, in theory, to do it. The newest version of TGE also lets you use collada files for interiors. So you can draw everything in google sketchup if you really want to.

summary
You can pretty much use any bsp editor to make a map. I use a combination of Google Sketchup with the vmf exporter, Quark, and Torque Constructor. I have personally heard of people using Hammer, Quark, Worldcraft, GTK Radiant, Torque Constructor, and 3DS Max to make maps for Blockland, and an even larger variety of editors for Torque games in general.

I love all your writings about mapping Wedge. I've read just about all of them and they are very useful.

I may try Sketchup one of these days... it seems interesting.

I may try Sketchup one of these days... it seems interesting.
It's simple but takes skill to use effectively. I've used it for making some weapons before.

Wow, I completely forgot about Quark, I gotta try it, lasttime I've heard about it was when retail was released. Someone from TBM told me about it long ago, Dshiznit and Jookia I think?

I gotta try mapping in hammer and using torque constructor to spice it up a little and make it fit in with blockland's style abit.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2011, 12:08:48 AM by Isjix »

If you're looking for something easy to use then stick with Constructor. Sketchup may work well, it's meant to be a 3D architectural drawing program.