InsideQC Forums

hey i just stumbled across this on another forum i frequent. anyone heard of it?

http://www.moddb.com/news/jackhammer-ne ... blic-alpha

http://jackhammer.hlfx.ru/en/articles/2 ... asons.html

im already using it sicne a few days.
Its cool, has alot of features from GtKRadiant, and you can even show up your Quakemodels in the Editor (MDL and MD2 works fine).

what kind of feature were added? i havent downloaded it yet.

Interesting, but I don't think its quite mature enough for my needs. (missing prefabs, and goodies like spheres, cylinders, cones, etc.)

FWIW, there was a thread about this over at func_msgboard about this. Link was in the "What are you working on thread?" directed at ajay...

they also posted this. havent checked it out either.

http://sledge-editor.com/

Sledge is HL / Source engine only.

Make no mistake, Jackhammer is VERY promising though and I'm looking forward to seeing the next version. (I would suggest they consider adding .iqm model support at some point though)

but sledge is open source. im sure the changes needed to make it quake compatible would be minor for some of the coders here.

There are several tools out there to use Hammer for Q1 mapping, maybe they'd work with Sledge.

Took a closer look at the Sledge website.

Sledge is currently in alpha stage, so it may be unstable and some features are missing. Missing features include:

Advanced compile options
Built-in support for prefabs/instances
Automatic detection of game configurations
Windows jump-list/shell integration
Arch and sphere brush types

Same problem as with Jackhammer: Not yet mature.

Another problem with Sledge vs. Jackhammer: Sledge, being HL-only will only work with HL model formats. Jackhammer supports .mdl and .md2.

Also: .NET dependencies, so no fun for the linux users.

In all, comparing the two projects, Jackhammer appears to be the superior of the two despite Jackhammer not being open-source yet.

Just gave Jackhammer a try, seems I misunderstood what was incomplete. This is easily the equal if not better than Worldcraft 3.3.

GTKRadient confuses me, so I'm switching to this.

We recently switched to this for working on levels for OpenKatana and I'm certainly finding it incredibly useful so far, looking forward to when it goes open-source

What .map version does it save to? Is it the same as WC 3.3, as that can be problematic...

Saves to .jmf, and exports to what appears to be HL / WC33 spec .map format. (You'll need to use BJP's tools or tyrutils to compile, tyrutils supports compiling to bsp2 format)

Only real difference I can see just looking at a radient .map and the hlspec .map is that the hlspec .map has some extra numbers within [] brackets. (likely for nicer texture coords / scaling)

What's problematic about the wc33 / hlspec .map format? If it's an issue with a map being larger than WC33 can handle, jackhammer allows you to set maximum world size via the options menu. (IIRC 8192 is what jackhammer comes set to by default, which is what WC33 is set to.)

Only real issue I can see is that compiling for Q2BSP may be problematic due to neglect of the compiling tools.

Just that I had some issues when exporting to map with WC3.3. Just used Jackhammer though, exports and then compiles perfectly, displays all the map and entities with no issues (once I increased world size as you pointed out) and is similar enough to WC that I don't really have to learn new techniques. Extremely happy and impressed.

EDIT: Spent an increasingly happy 30 minutes tinkering and I'm really impressed, it's a fabulous upgrade; nice model display, smooth 3d view and so far no annoying errors

The problem with that map format arises if you have more than one person working on something, but of course that's increasingly unlikely today since a lot of Q1 mappers are hermits :-p