I'm working in Source a lot right now for contract work.

Thoughts:
- Radiosity and HDR are great. Any random lights I use and everything automatically looks amazing and perfect (which just means I have to redefine 'perfect' and try harder).
- The modeling pipeline is a goddamn nightmare, and the SDK situation in general is simply atrocious. It's like they really don't care if their tech is usable by anyone or not. 

cant you just block out geometry in trenchbroom? ;) 

The modeling pipeline is a goddamn nightmare

Please spill the beans :P 

What's to spill? None of it's secret, it's just painfully obtuse. writing your own batch files to set arcane poorly explained environment variables, different inconsistent overlapping versions of the SDK salted throughout your /steamapps/ folder, plugins that don't load even though you did exactly the same things you did last time, nothing gives you a useful error message, and when you've finally got a model you can load in the editor it's just got pink checkerboards on it even though you did everything exactly the same as you did last time there too, and no message why prints anywhere here either. then the model browser crashes because you clicked on one of the secret landmines that you can't click on without crashing the model browser and it stays like that until you quit out of hammer entirely. I haven't even tried an animated model yet. 

one of the several files you have to carefully collect in the right place before feeding it all to a command line app to build into a model is a .qc file

a .qc file 

Yeah, the Source art pipeline is, and always has been, absolutely terrible. But people put up with it because they have TF2 and CS and DOTA. :)

They say Source2 will fix all that but, yeah ... it's so bad, that I gave up any hope of ever doing anything of scale in Source. Life is too short. 

Valve's approach is to "place a very high value on previously shipped code." This is the nicest, most publicly digestable way of saying they never improve or fix anything unless some blockage legitimately forces them to.

They also place a high value on quick iteration, meaning get the feature in fast first so it can be playtested, and then quickly move on to the next thing, so that the code stays like that until it ships ... thus becoming previously shipped code, and therefore highly valuable!

fortunately, I'm getting paid for it. :P I wouldn't waste my time on this engine either, otherwise.


Titanfall is a Source title. IW was used to their Quake3-descended COD engine and Radiant-descended tools, and when they split with Activision I think they couldn't take the tech with them, so they went for the next closest thing to get up and running. 

i briefly dabbled with the source engine, but it was too much trouble to be worth it. :\

i also dislike script entities and prefer code style scripting so it was a struggle to get anything more than basic scripting done.

also, ironically, it seems like map limits are lower than they are in modern quake. :P 

Having wrangled with the model pipeline (its painfulness has not been exaggerated) there's also another stopgap that'll happen - the toxic Source communities.

It greatly varies by game though, but my personal experiences have been brats on Left4Dead and Gmod communities sending me various law enforceable threats for releasing a model, so I never released anything for L4D2 or TF2. None of it was criticism BTW, just your psychotic variants of 'fuck you <slurs go here>"

Don't know if that's different for mappers though. Mapcore was nice last time I checked. 

 

A supportive community of friends who encourage each other with honest feedback. *holds ur hand* 

the source model viewer's open dialog starts in "[ROOT]/models/", and if you hit "Up" and then immediately go back into "models" it shows you a completely different set of files 

What's the problem? Don't you want some more files? Files are neat! 

in our game right now loading maps from the command line doesn't work. on a hunch, since the command that does that in quake.rc is 'stuffcmds' I opened the console and typed that, and my map loaded. twenty fucking years that command has been in there, unchanged. 

I'm trying to spawn a physics object. just, make it appear when triggered, not when the map starts. there is no facility for this. I can't even hack it by switching its solidity and visibility off and back on. (invisible I can do, nonsolid: not possible.)

But you know what I can do? build a monsterbox outside the map with a trigger_teleport in it, and teleport the prop in! just like the good old days. 

The march sit on your arse without moving more than is strictly necessary of progress 

sounds like you will need a point_template entity.

Target it with teh "forcespawn" input and it will spawn all its listed entities. Can be done multiple times if required.