An Intro To Hl / Ns Mapping
Confused
Wait. What? Join Date: 2003-01-28 Member: 12904Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester
Wait. What? Join Date: 2003-01-28 Member: 12904Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester
<div class="IPBDescription">for persons who ahve never created a hl</div> I keep having people ask similar sorts of questions to me about starting off mapping for hl /ns. Generally they fall into 3 categories, 1 what do I need to get to make the next awesome ns map, second how do I begin making maps in hammer, and finally compiling. Each of these will be addressed in some depth.
Section 1: things you will/ might need
To make any Half-Life map you will need an editor, I recommend Hammer mainly because it is widely used but there is also Quake Army Knife(QuArk). Since my quark skills are lacking I will focus primarily on Hammer here after.
NS USES A NEW SET OF COMPILE TOOLS, the tools can be found here in the ns mapping forum.
Now that you know about what editors are out there, you may want to edit other things related to your map.
1. If you want to edit or create textures the program you need is called Wally. It is a standard of the Half-Life mapping community. Wally has a myriad of other things it can do, not merely editing and creating textures, since it is not my focus ill provide a link to a tutorial.
2. You may want a copy of Sprite Explorer. This will allow you to create sprites from .bmps and view the ones that have been provided to you by others with out running HL.
3. If you wish to view any models you will want Half Life Model Viewer.
4. A graphics editor bet it Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or for you poor college students The Gimp.
5. you will most likely want to get Nems Tools, specifically the batch compiler. Tutorials for the tools can be found here. Most of Nems tools are quite cool batch compiler is the essential tool from the list. I HIGHLY recommend suing the compiler here it but it is not mandatory.
Section 2: setting up/running Hammer
Now you have a bunch of files sitting of your hard drive somewhere that I told you to download. we will break this down into nice easy steps for you.
Step one: unzip hammer into a folder of your choosing(in my case d:\Hammer).
Step two: unzip Xp-cagey’s tools to the folder of your choosing (in my case d:\hammer\tools)
At this point you have all the things you need to make an ns map on your hard drive!
It is now time to run hammer. When the program loads, it will inform you that, in fact, it is unset up and would you like to set up the program. Of course you do! This will bring you to a window that has six tabs across the top (if not you can open the panel under tools> options). Each label will have its own paragraph devoted to it. The tabs should be: General, 2d views, 3d views, Textures, game configurations, and build programs.
The General Tab: essentially this tab is not relevant right look it over see that here is where you can change the amount of undo levels, should hammer strain your system. don’t worry hammer will warn you if your system load is “quite high” and will suggest changing this option.
2d views Tab: most of this is either self-explanatory or will be come so rapidly for now skip over it.
3d views tab: again most of this is obvious. It should be fine with defaults on most machines.
Textures: just when you thought it was getting easy. You are stumped what is a wad? Where can they be found? A wad is a compilation of textures for half-life. (Textures are what we are going to cover the wall in). For ns, most of the wads you will want to use will be in your ns folder(in my case e:\h\ns). So add ns.wad to the list.
Please note: that some problems have been noted with using a large number of wads so stick to as few as possible.
Game configuration tab: this a complex tab. First one has to create a configuration. this is done by clicking on the edit tab next to the text box marked configuration. A window will appear and give a list of installed configurations. Hit add perhaps naming you configuation “natural-selection”. now suddenly there is a name in the configuration tab of hammer. Move down one slot to the text field marked “game data files” to the right of it hit add, the file you are looking for is located in the ns directory, the same place as the textures. move past the four pull down menus. To the four directories and select them the first 3 are obvious. The last directory entry is merely the place you would like to have your maps saved and compiled from (Rmf is the hammer map format).
All the available spaces are filled and we move on to the last tab build programs.
At the top select the configuration you would like to associate these programs with. In the next slot locate hl.exe on your hard drive. The next 4 slots will point to the Xp-Cagey Comile tools you just downloaded (csg is hlcsg etc. etc.)
The final slot should be half-life/ns/maps as this is the location of the map you have made when half-life is running it. (BSP is the compiled map format)
<more to follow, but its late and im tired>
letme know what you think
Section 1: things you will/ might need
To make any Half-Life map you will need an editor, I recommend Hammer mainly because it is widely used but there is also Quake Army Knife(QuArk). Since my quark skills are lacking I will focus primarily on Hammer here after.
NS USES A NEW SET OF COMPILE TOOLS, the tools can be found here in the ns mapping forum.
Now that you know about what editors are out there, you may want to edit other things related to your map.
1. If you want to edit or create textures the program you need is called Wally. It is a standard of the Half-Life mapping community. Wally has a myriad of other things it can do, not merely editing and creating textures, since it is not my focus ill provide a link to a tutorial.
2. You may want a copy of Sprite Explorer. This will allow you to create sprites from .bmps and view the ones that have been provided to you by others with out running HL.
3. If you wish to view any models you will want Half Life Model Viewer.
4. A graphics editor bet it Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or for you poor college students The Gimp.
5. you will most likely want to get Nems Tools, specifically the batch compiler. Tutorials for the tools can be found here. Most of Nems tools are quite cool batch compiler is the essential tool from the list. I HIGHLY recommend suing the compiler here it but it is not mandatory.
Section 2: setting up/running Hammer
Now you have a bunch of files sitting of your hard drive somewhere that I told you to download. we will break this down into nice easy steps for you.
Step one: unzip hammer into a folder of your choosing(in my case d:\Hammer).
Step two: unzip Xp-cagey’s tools to the folder of your choosing (in my case d:\hammer\tools)
At this point you have all the things you need to make an ns map on your hard drive!
It is now time to run hammer. When the program loads, it will inform you that, in fact, it is unset up and would you like to set up the program. Of course you do! This will bring you to a window that has six tabs across the top (if not you can open the panel under tools> options). Each label will have its own paragraph devoted to it. The tabs should be: General, 2d views, 3d views, Textures, game configurations, and build programs.
The General Tab: essentially this tab is not relevant right look it over see that here is where you can change the amount of undo levels, should hammer strain your system. don’t worry hammer will warn you if your system load is “quite high” and will suggest changing this option.
2d views Tab: most of this is either self-explanatory or will be come so rapidly for now skip over it.
3d views tab: again most of this is obvious. It should be fine with defaults on most machines.
Textures: just when you thought it was getting easy. You are stumped what is a wad? Where can they be found? A wad is a compilation of textures for half-life. (Textures are what we are going to cover the wall in). For ns, most of the wads you will want to use will be in your ns folder(in my case e:\h\ns). So add ns.wad to the list.
Please note: that some problems have been noted with using a large number of wads so stick to as few as possible.
Game configuration tab: this a complex tab. First one has to create a configuration. this is done by clicking on the edit tab next to the text box marked configuration. A window will appear and give a list of installed configurations. Hit add perhaps naming you configuation “natural-selection”. now suddenly there is a name in the configuration tab of hammer. Move down one slot to the text field marked “game data files” to the right of it hit add, the file you are looking for is located in the ns directory, the same place as the textures. move past the four pull down menus. To the four directories and select them the first 3 are obvious. The last directory entry is merely the place you would like to have your maps saved and compiled from (Rmf is the hammer map format).
All the available spaces are filled and we move on to the last tab build programs.
At the top select the configuration you would like to associate these programs with. In the next slot locate hl.exe on your hard drive. The next 4 slots will point to the Xp-Cagey Comile tools you just downloaded (csg is hlcsg etc. etc.)
The final slot should be half-life/ns/maps as this is the location of the map you have made when half-life is running it. (BSP is the compiled map format)
<more to follow, but its late and im tired>
letme know what you think