TL:DR - First impressions not bad, Valve could do some stuff to fix some road bumps I encountered but it’s better then the old Source SDK.

So before we get into the meat and potatoes of this post, I want to say that is my first impressions using the Destinations Workshop Tools and not the independent build that is set to come out at some point or another, and what I say here might change when the free standalone Source 2 SDK releases. Additionally I would also like to mention that I won’t be mentioning how the Particle Editor works because I have not touched that tool yet…

Now I was a modder once upon a time before I stopped in 2015 after discovering what my true passion is, but because of this I am quite well versed in how one would create assets (models, textures, maps) for the 14 year old engine; Source. Other then waiting for maps to compile, I didn’t really think the now outdated tools was all that painful to use. I created a bogie wheel in a smaller gauge then a full fledged railway as a test model and through this I’m going to find out what makes these tools tick and if there any complications along the way…

The Model Editor:

Now this is an definite improvement over it’s predecessor - You don’t need any QC files or any plugins to export models into Source 2: All you need to do is export from your program as an FBX file (or SMD if you want to do that), open the model editor and choose to create new from file, locate where you exported your model to, ignore the warning about it being outside of the directories of the given game, tell it where you want the outputted .vmdl file to go (this is where you can change what measurement you want the engine to translate the scale, since I made the model in metres I chose CM), if you have a collision file (don’t know how to generate that yet) you will need to tell Source 2 where that is, and then S2 does the rest more or less… Right off the bat this seems miles easier and quicker then how you would compile .mdl files for Source 1.

The auto-compiling feature is a nice touch as well because you can see changes done in realtime. Which I think helps with the creative process quite a bit!

However there is a few problems I feel needs to be addressed: Firstly the pivot tools (move, rotate, and scale) seems to be greyed out meaning I couldn’t move my model away from the floor so I could see the entire thing. Secondly I could not figure out how you could change what material the model would use instead of the one you told the editor when you first created the model… I feel like this is an oversight from Valve because say you want to change the material for your model to something completely different and it has a different name to what the model has been assigned; you could not easily be able to do that without maybe recompiling the model which inside itself slows stuff down… Overall I feel like this is counterintuitive.

The Material Editor:

Unless you have VTFEdit, making textures for Source was hard and difficult, as like compiling models for said engine, it was heavily reliant on text commands. The new Material Editor, while not perfect, is a step in the right direction! What I liked the most from this tool is that everything you’ll need is more or less there, menu’s that allow you to easily change the shader your using, being able to change what attributes the texture will have (like if it is going to be like wood, metal and other stuff like that) and you can (nearly) add the textures with ease! Another plus is you don’t need to convert your main textures into a proprietary format (like VTF’s for instance) and you can have the base texture as the more universally used TGA or PNG file formats (There are other ones to choose from as well ;))

Also can we take a moment to appreciate that Valve took the time to have a dedicated Substance Painter shader built-into Source 2? I mean Valve could’ve easily not done that and forced us to use a different shader for our material, but they have a created a shader that would properly show the material as it was in Substance Painter… Now whether Valve did this because they are using Substance Painter now instead of Photoshop or the very similar (but stupidly expensive) Mari program, or just because they knew modders/developers are using it is completely up in the air… But it’s still nice it’s there…

In terms of things I didn’t like with the tool, the main thing that’s sticking out for me is that when the model editor automatically generated a material for me, it locked out the “Metalness Texture” option even if I had the specular map enabled, I couldn’t figure out to enable it… What I ended up doing was creating a new texture from scratch and that seemed to have fixed it as I could now click on that option as you can see above.

Hammer 5:

Hammer 5 looks and feels like the next logical step for the map editor to take: You can easily change the layout of the editor, the docks are a definite improvement, and the pivot tools similar to what you find in Blender, C4D, etc, is a nice touch. Speaking of nice touches the dynamic lighting system inside of the new engine means we can have get a real-time look of the lighting in Hammer without a need to compile it and launch the game, I think this really helps because you can quickly and accurately see how the environment looks without spending potentially hours waiting for the map to compile in the older engine, which in turn means you can focus on the creative aspects of the map!

The I/O system from previous Valve engines (Goldsrc and Source) has once again made a return which I’m very pleased about; it’s so much easier for me to get my head around then a node tree system found in other engines and I find myself able to make somewhat complex scripts inside Hammer more efficiently then say the blueprints system found inside UE4. I haven’t tried the terrain tools in this version of Source/Hammer, but by what I’ve seen in a video, it looks immensely more powerful and useful compared to the tools given in Hammer 4.x!

Speaking of more useful tools: the new and improved level compiling tool bundled in Hammer 5 is very clean and still just as easy to get your head around like the older version. The presets allows you to quickly choose how you want to compile your map (there is now a custom option if your looking for something more specific), interestingly enough there is a “Final Compile” option along with the “Full Compile” variant… honestly though I couldn’t tell you what the difference is! Then you get options for things like loading the map in the game (launching the game as it where), any custom commands you want the engine to execute while loading the map (Console Commands) and finally when your ready, just hit “Build”!

The new dialog box is a lot moe useful as well… Namely because it doesn’t immediately close the moment it has finished compiling (or failed to do so) and because the font is a lot more crisper and clearer compared to the old compiler; you can read the log more easily.

Honestly I didn’t have much issues with Hammer, I like how you can do things like change the grid size through a dropdown menu instead of remembering the key combination to do so, I like the real-time lighting of the viewport and overall I feel it is an improvement over Hammer 4.x!

Misc Problems:

I feel this needs noting but I’ve noticed when as you probably have as well that unless the material is really well lit, it’s just black and I have verified it’s due to the “metalness” map. Now I don’t know steel too well but I think that it would refract light even in darker environments. It’s probably just a bug in this branch of Source 2, but it’s sill an inconvenient one none-the-less.

Would I use it?:

Now let’s say hypothetically I was a game developer and I was developing a VR Title and the standalone Src2-SDK was released, would I use it? Maybe. I know for most of this post it seems I’ve had more problems then successes in my little test, but I do see immense potential in these tools and they are a lot easier (and dare I say: fun) compared to the older tools found in the original Source SDK. Could I possibly get around most if not all of these problems by looking at the Valve Developer Wiki? Possibly, yes. But if Valve fixes some of these gripes I’ve had with these tools in the next branch of Source 2 then I theoretically would seriously consider the engine as the underlying base of my VR experience, but as it stands I feel Valve is very close of achieving their aim on creating tools that one could more efficiently create mods/games on!