Writings

Half-Life level design: The beginning

This is a very basic tutorial telling you how to set up your most vital Valve Hammer Editor options (important directories, compile tools and textures).

_{Note: This tutorial was written for and applies to Valve Hammer Editor 3.x.}

Download and install the editor

Download and install Valve Hammer Editor (follow this link to VERC Collective)

From the top menu, select Tools > Options... and choose a tab according to the following steps.

Game Configurations

Before and after:

Click on the Edit at the top right corner, then add a game configuration by clicking on Add. The program prompts you for a name. Input anything you want here, but I'd suggest you make it descriptive, something like Half-Life.
Now it's time to set up the configuration. You'll need an FGD, so click Add next to the Game data files box and add the appropriate FGD file. The most popular mods' FGD files are found within Valve Hammer Editor's installation directory, and custom mod-specific FGD files are usually found from their own installation directories.
You can leave the Texture Format, Map Type, Default PointEntity class and Default SolidEntity class boxes to their default values, as the first two can't even be changed to anything else. Later on, you might want to make entity handling quicker by selecting something else for the last two drop-down boxes. For example, I use info_player_start for default PointEntity and func_wall for default SolidEntity.
Game Executable Directory points to the directory where you've installed Half-Life (eg C:\Sierra\Half-Life)
Mod Directory points to the directory of the modification you're mapping for (eg C:\Sierra\Half-Life\valve if you're creating a traditional Half-Life map)
Game Directory is for the directory where files are taken from if the custom mod can't supply them (eg C:\Sierra\Half-Life\valve). Note that if you're not mapping for any specific mod, this and the one right above (Mod directory) should be identical.
RMF Directory is where Valve Hammer Editor will prompt you to save your maps (eg C:\Program Files\Valve Hammer Editor\maps)

Build Programs

I'll risk going to the more advanced level here, but in the end it's only good to learn the better compiling style at the very beginning.

Batch compiling has been a faster alternative to Valve Hammer Editor's built-in compiling for a long time now. The traditional way is to create a .bat file, but doing anything command-line related alienates some users from it. That's where Nem's Batch Compiler steps in. It's an external program that allows control over everything compiling-related, without having to think what which parameter really controls. Click here for help setting it up.

Textures

Make sure you have at least one WAD file in the list, like this:

NOTE: Don't add too many WAD files to the list. If the list contains too many files, you might get a compile error when you try to run your map. The max amount of WADs isn't a constant number, but in normal situations over 8 WADs isn't considered good.

This is a very easy part. Here's where you'll need to define the used WAD files that contain the textures you use in your map. Click the Add WAD button on the right.
The open file dialog pops up. You should usually include halflife.wad from the valve directory (eg C:\Sierra\Half-Life\valve)

We're done

You might want to browse through the remaining tabs (General, 2D views and 3D views) and change the settings. You don't necessarily need to do anything in them, so if you don't understand the settings in those 3 tabs, don't change them. You'll learn their meanings later on.