sassblassted
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2022
Actually I'm working with source 2 right now (Don't ask me why, at this point it's starting to feel like stockholm syndrome), whose map editor does have lighting preview and a lot of other quite nice features. I'm specifically thinking of the actual vscript APIs being literal dogshit. From my personal experience it seems like 10% of functions/classes are documented by valve, 20% have been documented by community experimentation, 50% are entirely undocumented and 20% are literally broken or will crash the game.Use Hammer++ then, it's way better than normal Hammer. Has ingame lighting preview mode for the 3D viewport which means no more changing lights, recompiling map, testing it ingame, going back to change lights again, recompiling the map again, testing again, rinse and repeat.
I'm just a hobbyist, but comparing the unity C# or unreal C++ API (hell, even the jank ass homebrew godot language) to vscript is a genuine world of difference. It seems like Valve simultaneously wants to abandon the engine since they never develop it further, but also see it as a point of pride, as they keep developing new games for it (HL:A, Deadlock, allegedly HLX). On top of that they also have their 2 largest cash cows (Dota 2, CS2) running on it, so they can't just drop it entirely, even if they wanted.
I'd honestly have a lot more respect for valve if they just said "We don't have the resources to maintain proper modding tools, so you get nothing at all", rather than dangling a rotten carcass in front of us and expecting the community to dissect and document it for them. Source 2 being kept in this weird limbo of "almost a modern game development engine" is real shame. It has all the requirements of modern games; PBR textures, dynamic lighting, post processing, 3D particles, animation graphs, and more, but then it also has these built-in features that literally crash the game if you try to activate them. I want Source 2 to be a viable alternative to Unity and Unreal, I really do, but unless they open source it in a way where you can actual get (and modify!) the class and object definitions directly in the source code, in the same way you can in other engines, Source is doomed to die a slow and extremely painful death.

