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green_meklar

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2009 April 10

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Citizens demand a stadium. And more cream of celery soup.

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2009 Apr 15 at 22:52 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

I might be able to manage something. I should at any rate start by unifying the functions for singleplayer and multiplayer spawn points, then I might be able to figure out a system for placing spawn points in a more Counterstrike-like style. No guarantees.

Keep in mind that this program is not meant as a replacement for any other program you already have (with the exception of Automap). It is a generator, not an editor.

2009 Apr 15 at 21:24 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

Well, as far as I know most of the standard entities (light, light_environment, func_wall, func_water, func_door, func_ladder) are supported by Counterstrike, and one of the posters on the VERC forums, wolf, said that the Half-Life textures were also compatible with Counterstrike. So although the program can't make Counterstrike-specific entities itself, you should be able to generate a 'bare' map (that is to say, no items, monsters, player spawns or chargers on the map) and then add any necessary Counterstrike entities manually. In fact, technically the info_player_start and info_player_deathmatch entities (the former without suits) generated by the program would work for Counterstrike CT and T spawn points too, however at the moment they're placed randomly with no consideration for teams. The layout of most of the generated maps also isn't very conducive for team play, although a desert with buildings in it might work out. You could also for example simply generate a building to place in an existing layout.

2009 Apr 15 at 21:01 UTC

A problem that occured in Hammer Mapping

As far as I know, if there's a leak then the RAD is never run at all (because it can't calculate lighting properly when a leak is present). Since the RAD takes up by far most of the compile time, you end up with very quick compiles- but maps that don't have lighting.

2009 Apr 14 at 21:46 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

It's perpetually in testing and development, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun or useful in the meantime. And it's about as user-friendly as it's going to get, which is way short of ideal but (in my humble opinion) still good enough for the casual user- no worse than Half-Life's own developer console, at any rate. If you have Windows and Hammer, then by all means, try it out and let me know what you think.

EDIT: I should perhaps mention though that currently the program is only designed to support the original Half-Life. It is not able to create any of the entities specific to such games as Opposing Force, Counterstrike, Team Fortress Classic, etc, so anything that isn't in Half-Life, you'll have to add. I may implement Opposing Force and Counterstrike entities eventually, although I can't really test the latter as I haven't got Counterstrike installed.

EDIT: I just discovered a serious problem which, among other things, was causing very few shipping containers and mainframes to be created. Fixed version is up now.

2009 Apr 14 at 20:11 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

That file is the only file the program outputs to, and it is always cleared and overwritten with a heading section (the specifications of the worldspawn entity) immediately when the program starts. Nothing else is created until the program knows what it's supposed to create, because it can't go back and fix anything that's already been generated.

That's correct. If you want to save any generated content for later, you have to move the file or copy the content to another file before you run the program again.

2009 Apr 14 at 18:22 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

Neither had I. I don't know what exactly is included in windows.h that isn't included in the other libraries I'm using. In any case, personally I find the text colors quite helpful in determining what's what in the console.

Now that I suspect is an issue either with your emulator or with something you did to the code accidentally before compiling it. The maze generator doesn't crash for me no matter what dimensions I put in, so long as they're valid integers.

2009 Apr 14 at 15:19 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

Mm-hm. The problem is that the maximum random height of a warehouse is less than 2000, so when you have walls 1000 units thick, there's no space inside. You're right that I should make that 'safe', but you still would not get anything useful that way. Try a wall thickness of 1 instead; since there'll be nothing outside the map, the vis will still work fine on that if you try to compile it after.

2009 Apr 14 at 02:01 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

Is it a consistent error? If so, I may be able to explain and/or fix it. Bug reports are welcome.

The filepaths are all relative and should work fine (at least on any Windows system...I know nothing about WINE) provided you don't move the EXE and the folder away from each other, or restrict permissions on any of the files the program uses (including the output MAP file).

EDIT: I modified it slightly. I have honestly no idea whether it will help, but you can try it.

2009 Apr 13 at 23:49 UTC

Another generator in Hammer Mapping

*works up the courage to post*

Hi people!

I posted a similar thread to this in the VERC forums back in January, so some of you (particularly Killer-Duck, I recall he was there) may recognize me. I realize this here is a rather tight-knit community, so I hope I'm not barging in, or breaking any rules or customs by posting a thread that one, isn't asking for help, two, is a near duplicate of one I posted on the VERC forums, and three, mostly comes down to advertising. Yes, I admit it. So if you don't like advertising and/or have no interest in 3D procedural content generation, don't read any further.

Over the past few months, I've been writing a Half-Life 1 map and map component generator in C++. Although my original intention was just to be able to place random crates and shipping containers and stuff in a room, I kept writing more and more functionality into the program until by now it is over 8000 lines long (making it one of the longest programs I've ever written, in any language) and quite sophisticated. The reason I wanted to post about it here, of course, is that this site is the home of the Freshmap and Automap programs, so I'm hoping that the people here are the kind of people who would both be interested in my program and would be able to give me evaluations and suggestions from the most experienced viewpoints.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to use the Windows GUI with C++, and so my generator relies on a command line interface; that is to say, it looks like the Windows command prompt, only a little more colorful. That said, though, from my limited knowledge of Automap and Freshmap, I would guess that by now my generator is probably the more advanced program, but it does have a few obvious drawbacks (although I hope to correct many of them in the future) and is probably less reliable as well as having worse usability. I also don't know exactly what operating systems it will work on, other than that it runs fine on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

With all that said, for those of you who don't find typing numbers into a console too tedious, here's the link to the ZIP on box.net:

http://www.box.net/shared/34b9x7itub

Hopefully the above URL will remain the same for the foreseeable future. However, if it changes, the updated link should be available on the downloads page on my website:

http://green-meklar.110mb.com/Downloads.html

So, what are your thoughts? Really disappointing? Totally awesome and I should post about it on Snarkpit too? Difficult to use? Needs such-and-such added to it? Doesn't run on [insert operating system here]? Kinda cool, but anything SuperJer writes will always be better? I'm hoping to get some decent feedback so that I can improve the program in the most effective directions, although keep in mind that I'm neither a Hammer expert nor a C++ expert and so there are some limits as to what I'm able to do.