Hammer 3D View - Lighting Preview

[Blink]

I was having a little tussle in IRC with Prowl and a few others over whether the whole Hammer 3D Lighting Preview was real or just a sham. I saw a few photos of it apparently running and an old thread from HL2World but obviously you can't trust that place, so I chucked Valve an E-mail:

Hi Simon-

OK. First you go into one of the 2-D views and make a box with the brush tool. Then... :)

Good question. The problem with Lighting Preview is that it is not usable in the current state of our 'release' branch. And I can't merge it from our development branch to our release branch without bringing over a bunch of changes that would not coexist well with the other tools (DLL interdependencies and so forth). So the bottom line is that it will be available once we release Ep2, TF2, and Portal.

-Best Regards,
Mike Durand
Valve

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Simon [mailto:*****@interlopers.net]
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 4:50 PM
To: Mike Durand
Subject: Just a question - not a help request.

Hi Mike,

I have a question regarding Hammer that I wonder if you could address for me, don’t worry it’s not another “How do I make a room?” e-mail.

I was wondering what the current state of the Hammer Lighting Preview is, or even if it exists currently. I understand it was an option at one time but crashed almost every time, are there plans to make it more stable for normal users to enable or are there complications that stop that happening?

Many thanks for your time

So it looks like Episode 2 and all the other Valve games won't be the only decent thing released. I look forward to it.

[The Watcher]

Very cool; I do hope it happens.

[Spas12]

oh hell yes! its about time the editor stepped up a bit.

[ChopperDave]

Well, the code for it is already in the shaders, so I would imagine it's happening.

[undertone]

whoot.

i hope they arent feeding you bullshit

[Mr. Happy]

he's saying that they use it in-house so i doubt it's bullshity yay!


maybe they'll bring back the logical view too

[NightWolf]

Now im looking forward to release of those games even more

[The Watcher]

Perhaps this is one of the big reasons why the release dates kept getting bumped...

[Zipfinator]

Finally an update that's actually worth having! This will make things much easier.

[undertone]

he's saying that they use it in-house so i doubt it's bullshity yay!


maybe they'll bring back the logical view too

logical view?

[Mr. Happy]

apparently it was a flowchart that showed all entities and i/o connections in your map

i could have sworn i read that this existed for like a week and was taken away by an sdk update, but i cant find a picture or mention anywhere so maybe i was dreaming

[Sorrow]

Ohh this is nice yeah.

[Head]

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

[BaRRaKID]

FINALLY!!

I wonder if they will update other things...

[Shr3d]

Thanks for the update Blink.