Step Two

In this step, we will begin with our first creation in Hammer, the basis for many future buildings. By this, I mean, the most basic room; four walls, one floor and one ceiling, without any other details.

To do this, let’s start by making some blocks for walls.

Use the various view points to build narrow, rectangular blocks to use as the walls, as so. Remember, you can even right click on a block and copy and paste it, so they will be identical.

Now, make absolutely sure that there are no gaps in between any of your walls. This will cause a compiling error further down the line, so either let those blocks intersect or get them together (like at the red arrow). Now, after we’ve added the ceiling and floor, we’re ready to move on to the next step; adding textures.

First, select View and then select 3D textured Polygons (item 1). This will allow you to see what your blocks look like. To add textures to one of your walls select it with the selection tool (item 2), and then use the Apply Current Texture Tool(item 4).

You can select a texture from the current texture dropdown (item 3). I chose the dev_height texture because I personally like the look of the developer’s texture set (item 5).

Once you’ve applied your textures, you’re ready for the last simple step; adding an entity.

Entities come in two main types, point entities and brush entities. Point entities are objects, NPCs, and invisible triggers and scripts. Brush entities are brushes, like our blocks above, that can be interacted with and moved. We will go further into detail with these in a later post.

But for this room, we’re going to need some entity for it to compile properly, so let’s set up one of the most important ones, the player’s spawn point. First, select the Create Entity Tool (item A), and before you drag on your map, select which entity you wish to spawn from the drop down under ‘Objects’ (item B). We’re looking for the ‘info_player_start’ entity, the spawn point.

Then, simply drag and place it on the map and press enter (item C).

There, and thus the room can be compiled, and you can actually play in it yourself to test it out. Compiling is a word you’ll soon hate if you intend on working more with the Source Engine, but for now, it’s rather simple.

Save your map, and it will be in the .vmf format. But it’s still not ready for you to play. First, you have to select File and then Run Map. Your map will be converted into a BSP file, and it should open in the base game you own.

If everything went as planned, you just made your very first map! Congratulations!

Okay, so it looks pretty ugly at the moment. But in our next step, I’ll show you how to make a more  pretty map, with lighting and advanced textures.

For further reading: Various Authors (2010). Valve Developer Comnunity Retrieved from

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/