Hammer low memory

[The Brick]

Hi, I have a highly annoying problem in hammer.
When I'm picking a texture, I scroll up and down to look for a good one. But hammer pumps all the textures into my memory. I have 512mb but it's full in no time. Everything goes really, really slow then, and the only way to clean my memory is to close hammer and restart it again. Isn't there an alternative way to clean my memory?

Oh and I just downloaded a PhotoRealistic Texture Pack. But I don't know how to use these textures...Help?

 

[Xenethyl]

There are programs out there that will attempt to maintain a stable memory level on your computer by ending the use of inactive memory. However, in your case I don't think any of these programs would do you any good as the strain on your memory is coming from one program that in fact does need it, whereas the memory cleaning programs will free up memory from programs that are no longer using it. One thing you could try, though, is to reduce the size of the displayed thumbnails. There's a drop-down box in the texture browser that lets you select a texture size. You could set that to a lower value than what you already have and see if that helps you with your memory use. You could also try a program that runs in the background and makes your memory more readily available if you wish (there are some programs here that you may want to look at if you're interested: http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?qt=memory+optimizer&tg=dl-2001), but as I said before I don't believe that they will help you all that much.

As for your question about the Photorealistic Texture Pack, the textures in that package are of various image formats and need to be converted to the Source material format. You can use the program titled vtex.exe and located in INSTALL_PATH/Valve/Steam/SteamApps/USERNAME/sourcesdk/bin/vtex.exe. There is a tutorial on how to convert the images to the Source material format here: http://www.hl2 world.com/wiki/index.php/Texture_Introduction (make sure you remove the space between hl2 and world in the domain name, the forum censor is annoying with these links) and it should get you going on the right path.

I hope this answered your questions (if not feel free to ask more ). Good luck with your maps.

 

[The Brick]

Ah fiddlesticks, all files (2051) are .jpg, and I don't have Adobe photoshop to convert them... Where can I get Photoshop?

 

[DrDevin]

Ummmm you could buy it for like a million dollars (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000063EMG/102-4330359-0737757). Iam kidding of course. I dont have the money to spend on photoshop so I would reccomend The Gimp. It converts files too but it is free http://www.gimp.org/