Yea well, since I've been bored, and mapping looks interesting, I downloaded a few things including Valve Hammer Editor.... I used this old link to get everything I needed http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...showtopic=50171

I then looked at how to start to make a box, ha, was I in trouble, I was frustrated because I couldn't get pasted making the brush, as in I couldn't make a floor, wall or anything. I'll post a few steps I did then hopefully somebody can help me!

Help the newb!

That is step 1 ofcourse, I did file>new

I went on to create a small box, 512 by 512 as shown

Sorry for making these many posts but yea, here's step 3

I created the brush.

Now this is where I completely die, I have no idea WTH to do, and I tried playing around with the place texture application and had no luck here it is.


somebody please friggin help me!

I tried "applying" the texture, but I seriously don't know, I want to try to make this damn box work! I've been frustrated over it, somebody please help the uber newb!

Eheh.

I suggest you start by reading a basic tutorial for stock HL mapping before trying something with NS. It will be simpler to learn the basics (like creating a basic room with a spawn, and compile it).

For example, to make a square room, you need 6 polygons, not just one (you can hollow it, but thats another story).

/start quark propaganda
And, if you find the Hammer editor confusing, you can try QuArK. When i first tried to map with Hammer i had no idea what to do with that weird interface, like you. Then i found QuArK, it was a lot less confusing to me and i had no problem creating the basic things.
/end quark propaganda

Good luck

Can I get a direct link to download it, lol it's late in the morning ( 5 in the morning ) and I'm having trouble finding quark for ns

On this page. Click "quark-win32-6.4.0alpha3.zip" then choose a mirror.

Theres also a small tutorial on how to set it up for NS on nsworld. Ignore the 1) and 2) in "Collecting the Installation Files" cause you already downloaded QuArK with the first link, and the latest version of QuArK doesnt require "python" anymore.

Last thing; if you map with Steam, you may have to extract the basic HL .wads (textures) from your .gcf files with GCFScape. If you map with WON, ignore this.

Grab some coffee too, you'll need it

I find quark simply confusing and it has(which admittedly could be very usefull) a huge amount of options that make it a whole lot more newbie unfriendly.

Doesn't gfscape need .net framework though? You'll get this weird and non-explanatory crash message with some memory adress trying to run a program that wants the .net framework but it isn't installed.

A few things:

Select view-> 3d textured polygons or you won't see how the texture is applied on your brush in the 3d view and if you can't see that you can't figure out how the texture application tool works by playing around with it.

Rooms in half-life are built by puting a bunch of brushes togheter so that no leaks to the outside 'void' occur. To make a simple box room without using any additional tools, make a hollow box out of 6 block brushes and texture the walls to your liking. The walls to the outside void do not need to be thick, along the lines where brushes meet it needs no thickness at all as long as the faces on the inside leave no gaps. Brushes need a thickness, it doesn't matter if it's 1 or 233 but it is easiest if it is a nice big round number such as 16 or 32.

Select a bunch of brushes, hold down shift and drag and they will be copied to where you drag them(This is hardly usefull unless you have texture locking on(button with "tl" on so that you won't have to keep reapplying the textures)).

You can group a bunch of brushes so that you select them all at once instead of individually. Do this by selecting them and pressing the green dotted square icon with the 2 brushes in it. To ungroup press the 2 brushes being snapped apart looking icon.

"ig" means ignore group so that you can pick out and edit a single brush in a group of brushes without ungrouping them.

You can split and chop of pieces of brushes as you wish with the clipping tool, select the brush/es and then select the clipping tool and click and drag where you want to cut. Press the clipping tool a few times more until you get the mode you want(split, chop of one of the sides of the line, chop of the other side). Be carefull to avoid having vertices that do not lie on a grid coordinate(the compile tools will force smaller detail onto the grid, often with bugs as a result). To check if a vertex is not on the grid use the smallest grid size and zoom in on it.

ctrl+m gives you the transformation tool, this allows you to rotate, scale and translate objects(use texture locking if you care about retaining the textures the way they where). Rotation and scaling is likely to cause vertices not on the grid. Rotating 90 degrees or 180 degrees in any direction should allways work without giving vertices on the grid. Translating with whole units should allways work. Scaling up with an integer should allways work. Scaling down with 2 should allways work if the vertices lie on the grid when you are using grid size 2, scaling down with 4 should allways work if the vertices lie on the grid when grid size is 4 etc. Smallest grid size is 1 unit.

Textures are allways of size 16*integer in each direction, keeping geometry simple and evenly divisible with 16 is usually a good idea. Textures are split to w_polys every 224 units if tiling and 240 units if not tiling. If you scale your texture by a factor of x(non-integer allowed) splits will occur at x*224(rounded to integer) for tiling and x*240 for non-tiling. Scaling up a texture on a face could therefor be very beneficial for your r_speeds, typically in large open areas. Scaling down a texture can be of no consequence if the face is small.

Polygons must be flat, if you use the vertex editing tool(allows moving "corners" of brushes) you will very likely end up with a faulty brush unless your carefull. A good thing to remember is that a polygon with 3 sides can be manipulated in anyway at all without being invalid, this is because you can allways find a plane such that the 3 vertices lie in it, this isn't true when you have more vertices. Since you won't be dealing directly with polygons but with brushes there are no triangles but only 3d primitives, however you can make a brush with only triangles as sides and the only thing you could possibly do to mess that brush up with vertex editing is turn it inside out. The most usefull application of this is taking a block and spliting it from the top along the diagonal with the clipping tool(press the clipping tool several times to get to the split function, the brush need to be selected to be clipped or it won't know what it is supposed to apply it to. You can clip many brushes at once) and then you can move the vertices up and down however you want without the brush being invalid, this is usefull for terrain and outside areas; there are problems, the clip hull(collision for players) gets somewhat buggy in many places on such terrain(HL or the compile tools doesn't like it when the normal of a surface doesn't lie in the plane defined by any pair of the coordinate axes in the editor and the collision with such a surface is often slightly bugged), and HL isn't good with handling many polygons so don't go overboard.

You need to place entities in your map, such as player spawns, lights, hives and a comm chair, there are excellent guides for the entities NS needs to have and how it all works.

Carve is evil, carve is evil, carve is evil, carve is evil, carve is evil, carve is evil....

ctrl+i and ctrl+l are usefull for mirroring a bunch of brushes(mirroring is not the same as rotating 180 degrees as anyone who has played tetris will allready be familiar with ).

All faces need to be convex, it's not nessecary to undertand what this means but as an effect where a complex object meets a flat surface is going to look like a mess of odd angled w_polys if you don't make the object(typically a pipe) a func_wall(entities don't "split walls") or if you don't leave a small(1 unit gap). To see what your w_polys look like in the game type "sv_cheats 1" and "developer 1" in the console then type "map <mapname>" and finally gl_wireframe 2 (you see a wireframe of polygons even through walls, this is what the engine see's and renders which is usefull to know so that you can place VIS blockers and hint brushes(a more advanced topic, don't worry too much about this until you have gotten a hang of the basic tools) )

Alot of newbie mappers make huge untextured rooms and don't use texture lights. Learn how to use texture lights(google up a tutorial, shouldn't be hard), try not to make huge empty spaces they are boring, no official map has anything but a few open spaces, corridors of sizes 128-256 units in width are pretty descent sized and easily traversed by everyone including onos if they are taller than 72 units(128-256 is to be recommended there as well).

If you don't use the nshulls.txt files in your nsp directory as a custom hullfile you will get weird stuck issues with the onos, it is more important that you get a hang of making simple maps first before taking on all the NS specific issues.

I find that Valve Hammer Editor was extremely confusing. I had an easier time getting used to "DEdit" for "Aliens vs Predator 2". The map editor seems usefull, but if I cant even make basic shapes then thats a problem. For instance: if I wanted to make a triangle by drawing it out, I should be able to do so. Just make a point and connect the dots, then specify the width and badda bing, there is your primitive, ready for texturing. Just plaster a texture on the face of a side of the object and again, your done. I find VHE somewhat tipping over the edge of non-newbie friendly and barely in the game.

The Help Files for VHE are of no help at all, whatsoever. Also, I cant find any tutorials on the VERC pertaining to first time mapping on the VHE. Bad... bad bad bad...

If anyone has any imput, or actually wants to talk to me on AIM or MSN and explain to me how the basics work then I can at least get on the road to getting something done and learning. Help me out here people.

I thank all 3 of you, and soy green for the information on valve, I'll try the other 2 editors though!

Yes, but in terms of making custom shapes for custom jobs, it seems like it would take some block molding to get it just the way you wanted it. Right? I am going to need a link to a very basic tutorial as to what to get started with and then move on to the more advanced tutorials.

I get by fine with the block, n-sided cylinder and n-sided "arch", I never even used the wedge after learning what it was. It's not a problem making terain, archways or whatever even if you only use 3 basic shapes like me all you need to know is vertex editing, rotating, mirroring, slicing and where the texture locking is so you can quickly make many instances of your "custom brush" once you've aligned the texture on the first one.

So.... where can I get a tut on how to do all this? Doesnt matter if its 5 hours long just as long as I learn. Also, if someone wouldnt mind, I always feel comfortable when talking to someone while doing it, that way I can ask questions and if something doesnt seem right then I can tell them.

I don't think you need a tutorial(I didn't, though I didn't find the tl icon and was instead left wondering why they didn't include some sort of texture locking feature because it would be very usefull), just a little patience.

first get used to the controlls, drag out a selection box with the selection tool and scale it in all directions in the different windows, get a hang of scrolling the different windows. You can select brushes in the 3d window directly by clicking on them with the selection tool, you can move around easily by draging the mouse and holding one of the mouse buttons in the 3d view with the camera tool selected. Holding controll a new selection is added to the old. Find the icon for changing grid size.

Copying a brush the easy way: enable texture locking(tl icon), select a brush with the selection tool, hold shift and drag and it will be cloned at the same depth in the current window.

Copying a brush the hard way: select them and then ctrl+c, ctrl+v, it is not likely to pop up at the same depth in the current window as the brush you are copying which makes this annoying and a lot more work than the above.

Mirroring: ctrl+l while brush or group of brushes is selected to mirror in the horisontal direction of the current window, ctrl + i for vertical. That's all you need to know about mirroring.

Rotating: select some stuff then ctrl+m and select rotate then enter a value for each axis, rotation around the Z axis is the most usefull, this is rotation in the horisontal plane. You can't go wrong when you use multiples of 90 degrees.

clipping: select a brush(/es) select the chopped off block icon, click and drag to make your cut in any of the normal windows, you can edit this selection by selecting any of the end points and dragging them around, press the clipping tool again until your spliting method of choice is selected(white is kept, red is discared, if you wish to keep both pieces press until the entire brush is white, if you want only one press until the correct piece is white and the one you wish to discard is red. It will cycle through these 3 alternatives.).

vertex editing: select a brush then select the vertex editing tool(hover over icons to see what they are named), The brush will now have it's vertices clearly marked. The mode where vertices are white and midpoints of connecting lines are yellow I find most usefull(press the vertex tool additional times if you wish to cycle between these, the first time you press it it will not change the current mode). Select a vertex or a group of them and move them as you wish, you can even move them in the 3d view as well but this is confusing. If you select a midpoint you can split this side so that you get a vertex, but only if the midpoint belongs to a side with it's face perpendicular to the window your selecting it in(that might sound confusing...), do this with ctrl+g. You might find it difficult to select the vertex you want, and instead select 2 vertices ontop of each other, to avoid this you can simply drag a box around the vertex you want, if you don't change it's depth it will select all vertices in the depth direction which is undesired, so be sure to make it into a box incasing the vertex you want. There are 3 things to remember, sides are flat, brushes are convex(can be defined as a brush such that any thought line intersecting it will enter into the brush only once and exit only once, a banana is not convex, a doughnut is not convex(you can think of a line passing through one side, out into the hole in the middle, into the other side of the doughnut and then out again, hence it's not convex)), brushes are not inside out, don't try and make brushes with these atributes or they will be bOrked and generate compiler errors.

I actually did some more screwing around with it and I have the hang of texturing, hollowing out the shape, entities, and all that other stuff, but how do I set up the parameters? I need some help with what to run stuff at.

setting up VHE or a batch compiler

That's what you're looking for?

I had that link on the 1st page. Follow it exactlly and you won't have any problems

I tried following it but didnt understand a word of it.

What are you getting hung up on?

Nevermind. I got someone else to help me through it.