A
allicorn
Guest
Hi folks,
I'm Alli, I'm new here, pretty new to HL2 development on the whole too. Just started out a month or two ago and wasn't totally sold on some of the tools that were available, so I started working on alternatives, now I'm looking looking for a little help testing a new tool for HL2 modders before I start publicizing it fully. Just basically a handful of people to give it a run though, confirm that it does what it's supposed to and give some comments on its effectiveness and ease of use.
The program has a whole bunch of features, which include:
Materials Compiler: an Advanced GUI for building VMTs and compiling materials. Also a Simple interface that allows you to throw pretty much any image at it and get a basic working world geometry material out the other end.
Models Compiler: a QC editor with contextual syntax help, prompted command building, preset QC templates and also a Simple mode which, like the Materials Compiler, should be really easy.
Team Collaboration features. It conveniently makes ZIPs of your modding work and helps the rest of your Team extract them. It allows you to select just models, materials, etc, compiled or source, has a date filter and other selectors.
Normalmap Generation. It generates normalmaps from heightfields acting as a frontend for Valve's height2normal tool or alternatively with one of two different built-in algorithms.
Texture Preview: While your texture work is still at the TGA stage it can display textures in a grid to help check tesselation, it can light and normalmap them and allows you to drag a llight source around over the texture to get a good feel for how your basetexture and normalmap are working out without you having to compile them and view them in Hammer or in-game.
There's also a simple project backup tool, an SMD->POV converter for rendering model demos and a little function to check if any of your VMTs reference VTFs which are missing or in the wrong place.
Well, you get the idea - it does some hopefully useful stuff. The little mod team I'm a part of have been using the thing as it came together, but it'd be great to have some objective views from other modders.
I'm not necessarily looking for just modding grandmasters - the tool is meant to be easy to use so having someone relatively new to HL2 content development test it out would be real useful too.
Anyway, if you'd like to help me out with this please PM and I'll get back to you with the link to download it.
Cheers,
Alli
I'm Alli, I'm new here, pretty new to HL2 development on the whole too. Just started out a month or two ago and wasn't totally sold on some of the tools that were available, so I started working on alternatives, now I'm looking looking for a little help testing a new tool for HL2 modders before I start publicizing it fully. Just basically a handful of people to give it a run though, confirm that it does what it's supposed to and give some comments on its effectiveness and ease of use.
The program has a whole bunch of features, which include:
Materials Compiler: an Advanced GUI for building VMTs and compiling materials. Also a Simple interface that allows you to throw pretty much any image at it and get a basic working world geometry material out the other end.
Models Compiler: a QC editor with contextual syntax help, prompted command building, preset QC templates and also a Simple mode which, like the Materials Compiler, should be really easy.
Team Collaboration features. It conveniently makes ZIPs of your modding work and helps the rest of your Team extract them. It allows you to select just models, materials, etc, compiled or source, has a date filter and other selectors.
Normalmap Generation. It generates normalmaps from heightfields acting as a frontend for Valve's height2normal tool or alternatively with one of two different built-in algorithms.
Texture Preview: While your texture work is still at the TGA stage it can display textures in a grid to help check tesselation, it can light and normalmap them and allows you to drag a llight source around over the texture to get a good feel for how your basetexture and normalmap are working out without you having to compile them and view them in Hammer or in-game.
There's also a simple project backup tool, an SMD->POV converter for rendering model demos and a little function to check if any of your VMTs reference VTFs which are missing or in the wrong place.
Well, you get the idea - it does some hopefully useful stuff. The little mod team I'm a part of have been using the thing as it came together, but it'd be great to have some objective views from other modders.
I'm not necessarily looking for just modding grandmasters - the tool is meant to be easy to use so having someone relatively new to HL2 content development test it out would be real useful too.
Anyway, if you'd like to help me out with this please PM and I'll get back to you with the link to download it.
Cheers,
Alli
