MAPPING WITH ICS - Introduction
Hello and welcome to my guide for mapping with an example map of mine, which i am currently building. While the map is not ready yet, i can now start these sessions in which i will
tell in full detail, how i did every step of the map. I have saved a development snapshot from my map from every stage for this purpose. There will be 25-30 parts in full of these sessions. While reading
this, you should have Hammer right next to you. More of this later how you install it and see things in it.
You will be able to open each of these development shots in Valve's Hammer world editor to see out how i did all the things i did. What you need is Steam in order to get the Hammer and
1 Source game, like CS Source so you are able to download Hammer through Steam. If you have Steam already and CS Source, you can start by opening Steam. Then click View from the menu and then
Tools. After that, you see bunch of Tools and dedicated servers. Only thing you need now is Source SDK. Download it and install. Do not download Source SDK Base, just and only Source SDK is
enough. After you have downloaded and installed it, it will appear on your Steam games list under Tools.
Start Source SDK by doubleclicking it and you will see a Source SDK menu popping up shortly. From this menu, there are 2 settings in the lower part of it that you need to touch first before
launching the Hammer Editor. First, Engine Version. Select Half-Life 2: Episode One. Then from the Current Game, select Counter-Strike Source. After this,
Start Hammer Editor. After it loads up, you got the Hammer Editor in front of you. If you have trouble of starting Hammer, Close down the Source SDK and then launch it again from the Steam
menu. If you still are having issues, Restart Steam and repeat these steps (No, not installimg it, just launch it again).
So now you should have the Hammer editor in front of you. There are 4 different screens which shows different angles. The black left upper corner is the camera which shows where everything
is. The next on the right, upper right corner shows the grid from the top. Lower left corner shows the grid from the front and lower right corner from the side. Basically every object
you see, is shown from 3 angles where you can adjust it + the camera shows a bit how the things are.
To see somekind of preview how things are, i created this "intro vmf" that you can download and open with hammer.
Download the intro vmf (this one) and part 1 of the map here (Use other browser than IE to do this)
Now, once you have downloaded the package, open it and save the files anywhere you like. The recommended path is where your Steam is installed. For example, for me the files are on
C:\STEAM\steamapps\MY_USER_ID\sourcesdk_content\cstrike\mapsrc\. Anwyays, open the file dev_slummi_intro.vmf into hammer first. After you have it open, you will see 3 grids and
black screen. The camera is black, this is a bug in Hammer and for this reason, i created this intro map. From the upper Hammer menu, select Map and then Entity Report...
After that, you get a list of entities, total of 5. Select any of them (press once with mouse) and then press that Go to button. After that, you can close that entity report box.
Now that you have that camera screen working, you will see the stuff that are in the room. A terrorist, lamp, lightbulb, bookshelf and a sofachair. Hover your mouse over the camera screen
and then press keys w,s, and d to move around. You can rotate the image with arrow keys. Up, down, left and right. You can zoom in and out with mousewheel. Nice looking room.. not. Every wall is different. Wood, brick, concrete, plaster.
The models are called props. There are several kind of props, prop_physics, prop_static, prop_physics_multiplayer, prop_dynamic, etc. These are the most common you will ever need to use on
your maps. Most common is prop_static. There are 3 static props (non movable) in that room. The sofachair, bookself and the lamp. The lightbulb is the entity light and it provides light
into the room - not the lamp on the roof. It sounds silly but its quite smart thing in Hammer. The info_player_terrorist is the terrorist spawn. There has to be 1 in each map for every
player. If 4 guys would play this map, there had to be 4 of those so everyone could play.
Anyways, this is the basic thing i did in few mins. Really easy thing to do. There are several things i could explain but i cant do everything so ill just explain the tools from left,
starting with the arrow:
Selection tool (the arrow)
- this tool is used to select objects, like the terrorist there or chair. After you have selected any entity, you can either press alt+p for it's properties or doubleclick it. From there you can adjust the settings it has. Lets pick that sofachair. Open it's properties.- Pitch Yaw Roll Y Z X adjusts its position. You can also rotate it by clicking it on the grid. There are 3 modes, resize, rotate and twist. In order to rotate a model like this sofachair, you need the rotate mode. Its the one with round shaped balls on corner. Click the entity on the grid to see how things change. Since its a model, you cannot change its shape (resize) or twist it. In order to test twisting or rotating, click any wall in that room and play with it.
- Minimum and maximum DX level - Dont touch these.
- World model - The model of the chair. You can browse other models by selecting browse and even replace the current one with some other.
- Skin - some models have different options for color and graphics. This chair does not have any other.
- Collisions - Not solid means that you can walk through it. Bounding box means that the model is in a box (yellow lines over it) and Vphysics means that the chair is shaped like it is. This is the most common setting for model.
- Disable Shadows - You can disable this models shadow with this setting. Usually not needed.
- Screen Space fade - i havent ever used it so i dont think you need to adjust it either
- Start Fade dist/pixels / End Fade dist/pixels - these 2 settings determine when the model start fading away and when its completely faded. I have set start fading 200 and end fading 400. When player appropaches the chair from distance, he cannot see it at all untill he is 400 pixels away from it. After that, he sees it fading in bit by bit untill hes 200 pixels away from it. That is the point when the model is completely visible. This usually is not needed to adjust but sometimes its usefull to use this if player cannot see the model but the game sees it through wall. More of this later.
- Fade Scale - Don't touch, default is fine
- Lightning origin - This determines where the light is coming from - usually you dont need to set this. I will get back to this later, much later part of the tutorial sessions.
- Disable Vertex lightning - no need to touch this either.
- Disable Self Shadowing with vertex - Dont touch.
- Ignore surface normal for computing - Dont touch.
There might be other settings too for separate models. You can even name models - Don't do this unless you really need to. Everything you do in hammer wastes resources. Naming these props is not needed. However, you cannot name this chair. You could name that lightbulb though.
Magnify tool
- this tool is generally something you dont need if you got a wheel on your mouse. Same feature.Camera tool
- You dont need this either, if you are familiar with keys aswd and arrow keys. Same thing really.Entity tool
- The very usefull tool. With this i set up the models aka entities in the map. Sofachair, lamp, lightbulb and others. Once you click this, you see right side of the hammer a space called Objects. There you see info_player_terrorist (or any other.) Once you click the screen in the camera window, 1 entity per click appears. If i do this, i see bunch of terrorists there. If you click that objects, you can select other entities or type in your own, like prop_static or light. To avoind having placing same entity multiple times, you can also use copypaste (ctrl+c and ctrl+v) to make things easier.Block tool
- this is the tool you build your maps with and the output of it is called a brush. For example, lets create another wall. Click any of the walls first with the arrow tool, the first one, then select the block tool, grey square. Now the block aka wall you will do will be the same height as the existing wall is. Now draw a wall with the grid on upper right corner which shows the area from the top or lower right corner which shows the grid from the side. Press and hold left mouse and slide the mouse. You will see a block appearing. Once its right shaped, press Enter. Wall appears. If you want different texture wall, there is the texture group on right side and a picture of a texture. Press Browse from there and you see a bunch of textures appearing. Since you want a wall, type wall into the Filter lower part of the screen. A bunch of walls appear. If you want concretewall, type that in there. If wood, type wood. If metal, type metal and so on. Doubleclick the preferred texture and thats it. You can also change existing walls texture, more on that with the next tool. Generally its good to keep things in line. Make brushes (things done with this tool) like 16,32,64,128,256 pixels widht or height, unless you really have to do some other height or width than this. Some doors might have to be 104 height, though.Toggle Texture Application
- This tool has several things it can do. Change textures, ground shape, visual shape and so on. If you click a wall first with arrow tool, the first one and then click this tool, you get the settings of that wall open. From the settings, you can change its texture, scaling, texture placement (move it, rotate it) and so on. There is also a Displacement tab - dont go there yet, i will tell you more about it with examples later on. Just concentrate on this Material thing now.- So if you got a texture there that you want to change now, ugly wall for example, click the browse, pick one texture (use wall as filter and pick something with a window on) and then hit apply. You will see that the texture is replaced but its out of shape! To fix this easily, there is Justify on the Material meny with 6 options. L (left) R (right) Fit (fit) T (top) B (Bottom) and C (center). Now, to make this easy, press B so it aligns properly. If you press fit, the whole texture will be fitted to fit the whole wall. Usually you do not want that. Play around with this. You can always undo with ctrl+z.
- Close the fade edit sheet. Then press the Toggle texture application again so Fadce edit sheet opens again. Now on your cursor, you have arrow and a paint bucket on it. Click any wall with left mouse. Then hover your mouse over another walls and click right mouse. Now the texture is replaced! You can also replace the textures by clicking replace, selecting the texture you want to replace with another and then replace but if you have same texture on multiple spots of the map, ALL these will be replaced so dont use it unless you want all replaced.
Apply current texture
- You can click walls with arrow tool and then click this tool and texture will be replaced, pretty useless tool in my opinion. First times i even touch it is now. You can also select multiple walls with arrow key in advance by holding ctrl and clicking around.Apply Decals
- With this tool you can add stuff over the existing walls, writings, images, text etc. Now lets browse textures first, type into Filter part decal and you see bunch of those. Pick any of them (double click) and then click a wall. The stuff appears. Not all that the filter lists are made to be decals. Experiment with it.Apply Overlays
- Same thing with decals, you can paint walls with these but overlays you can also adjust and resize and define fade distances. Use this instead of decals if you want bigger or smaller images on walls etc.Clipping tool
- this one is hard to explain but you can test it out by picking up a wall (brush) again with the arrow tool. Then press this tool once and then on the grid, pick point from which you want to cut piece off and then point where cut ends. Then press enter and poof, piece is cut off. I really dont use this - at all.Vertex tool
- Last tool but not the least. This is one tool really usefull if you create something that is going to be almost round. You can do a brush with any shape with this. Just be carefull that you dont do over 90 degree angles with it or it will be invalid solid (brush). Alt+p tells you if it is! Be carefull with this! Learn to use it untill you doom hammer to hell :)So this is it, the basic peak into world of Hammer. Next i will be starting to show my actual map with these tutorial sessions and explain how i planned and built every piece from it.
Mapping with ICS, part 1 - next part right here!