The Axel Project

Hey everyone, I’m lucas93. I’ve been part of TAP for 15 months now and haven’t written a single update. While I joined the team as a mapper, I now contribute code fixes and new features to the engine.

For those who have mapped with the stock 2003 Hammer, you all know of it’s many issues and list of features (or lack of features when compared with retail Hammer). It’s because of this that we’ve decided to update Hammer for our next release.

The first of the new features implemented into Hammer was the ability to load portal files in the same way as retail. This means we don’t have to use glview or the retail SDK to optimize our portals.

Some of you may have also noticed that a few faces in maps were too bright. While this isn’t really a new feature, it makes the 3D view look much nicer…

Any entity with a sound field (eg: ambient_generic) now has an option to preview the sound that is currently selected. This supports both direct WAV files and script sounds.

We have also added a sound script browser dialog. This is currently the biggest feature that was added to our Hammer. It even allows us to filter sounds making choosing sounds even easier!

There are also a few random features\fixes that are worth mentioning. These are:

• A ‘Go To Coordinate’ dialog box
• The loading progress bar has been modified to work when loading VMFs
• Multiple items can be selected and fixed in the ‘Check for Problems’ dialog
• The size of a selected object now appears in the 2D views

These features may not seem like much, but they have made a huge difference internally. They allow us to spend more time inside our own tools instead of switching back and forth between TAP and retail.

These updates will be made available with our next release. We hope they’ll help the community as much as they’ve helped us!