The information presented here details the methods I used -- or the resources I referred to -- while building my levels. While these seem to have worked for me, and while I endeavour to be as accurate as humanly possible, I can offer no guarantee that my methods will work for you, or even that they will be right for what you are trying to do.
Take them, therefore, for whatever they are worth.
Tools
- Valve Hammer Editor v3.4 is my editor of choice. There is a v3.5 beta also available, if you like. There are also a number of other editors which will work with Half-Life; one list can be found here.
- Compile tools. There are several variants available which are considered to be superior to the standard set of compile tools included with Hammer.
- Zoner's Compile Tools 2.53, Merl's Custom Build 1.7 are the absolute minimum you should be using; they provide support for switchable texture lighting, among other things.
- Zoner's Compile Tools 2.53, Merl's Custom Build 1.7, XP-Cagey's P series adds a couple of extra options which can be useful (or troublesome, depending upon your level.) I use these -- but at the time of writing, the xp-cagey.com site appeared to be down. Since I generally do not use the specific enhancements added by xp-cagey, I can safely say that you should get along fine with Merl's 1.7 Build above.
- It appears that ZHLT 3.0 is the latest, greatest version of the compile tools, which have a long and colourful development history;
I shall be switching to these tools for my next project! A preliminary test with these tools showed them to be buggy and unstable. Maybe I was just doing something wrong, but at this stage I shall stick with the version I've been using...
- Wally is the tool I use for building my own WAD files, although it can do quite a bit more than that.
- GenSurf looks to be a useful tool for generating realistic landscape surfaces, although I have not actually used it yet. I hope to have a play with it in the development of my next level.
Resources
- TWHL: "Half-Life Worldcraft / Hammer Mapping Tutorials and Resources" was the site which got me through the development of my first level. They have a wide variety of useful tutorials and articles, and I probably couldn't have got this far without them.
- A complete list of available entities, and their capabilities, is an invaluable resource. Of the following, I find the VERC one slightly more useful, but YMMV.
- The Art of Ladder Making, an article by Mark 'MotherGoose' Wilkinson, enlightened me with regard to my own ladders' flaws. If you want to make a better ladder (or handrail) I'd highly recommend reading this first. [I also intend to provide my own article to extend upon that one.]
- Switchable Texture Lighting is briefly mentioned here; this article is extracted directly from the ZHLT-2.53-1.7 documentation. [I shall provide my own article for this, too.]
Tutorials
Nothing here yet; still under construction!
