Source 2 and the new Hammer editor

So apparently Dota 2 will be receiving its Source 2 treatment by the end of this week. I've just seen this video showcasing the editor.
I just skipped through the video, due to a lack of time, but I noticed some nice things. The brush at 10:00 looks extremely useful. From the looks of it, it allows drawing replacements. At 12:15 you can see that even transitions are possible.

What do you think of it? I know, it's just a video, but it's enough for a first impression.

I for one, think it's amazing. Although that might just be because I had a lot of exposure to the old Hammer editor from Source one, and I'm still recovering.
Furthermore I wonder how much improvement Unity's terrain tools will receive. I think we all agree that this is one part where Unity is severely lacking.

 

Looks awesome. Would be nice if more tools like that were available.

However, there are so many factors at work here its hard to say that something like this should be in Unity. DOTA is one game getting a fancy level editor, Unity is a massively flexible Engine... I do agree that more tools that move in that general direction are good though. For instance Mecanim is amazing, maybe there will be better tools that make other facets of game design and composition much easier in the future as well, but I don't know what they might be in terms of Unity integration.

Old-HammerEd was a dark art. I'm glad that time has passed.

 

It looks line Unity with black theme

 

Wow, that is a seriously impressive level editor. Never seen anything quite like that before! I loved how the whole landscape style could be changed at the end of the demo with a few brush strokes, while still leaving the infrastructure intact. The water animating the whole way through the creation process is a lovely touch.

 

Neat!

Thanks for sharing.

Reminds me of the Warcraft / Starcraft editors from back in the day. And yeah, that brush is freakin rad.

I would LOVE to see more player intuitive editors like this. It's one of the big reasons why I'm such a huge Build engine fan.

 

The new Doom will have a similar easy themed editor.

The way they connect logic also reminds me an awful lot of the editor used by the sidescroller "Abuse".
That game also had one of the best level editors I can remember. No cryptic number- or hexcodes for certain functions. Everything is connected visually and easy to understand. a button opening a door? drag a connection line from the button to the door. several buttons? Create a switch (AND, OR, XOR) - drag a line from the switches to the logic switch and from there to the door.

Abuse also was the first game that introduced me to the idea of triggerboxes. Same thing here: Triggerbox - drag line to an enemy spawner: boom! Ambush situation.

Unfortunately I could only find gameplay videos. I still recommend checking out the editor for everybody who is interested in this stuff. Abuse is available for free on the internet since the company went bankrupt and released all of their so far produced projects. It's a DOS game - so anyone giving it a try will probably need DOSBox as well.

 

It's interesting, but the problem for Unity is that the engine needs to be more flexible than the DOTA 2 tools. The tools shown all run within the requirements of the engine (Pathfinding, Camera, Tile Size). It might be interesting if the terrain builder offered these types of "presets" though.

 

Umm.. Why is this video not showing up but downloading to my desktop.? Homey don't play that.

 

I used to really enjoy the level editor in Red Faction. It was very cool how you could create static and geomodable areas and really easily build some pretty complex maps including triggers and include your own sounds and textures. I created some bizarre multiplayer maps with it (one that was a huge barn and had a flying saucer outside that you could jump pad inside of and then shoot people with the rail gun until someone else got in and blasted you).

I also recreated the temple map from Goldeneye, complete with the big sliding stone slab doors that opened up when you walked up to them. My roommate and I spent hours playing Goldeneye on an N64 and drawing out the map on graph paper so we could reproduce it.

 

Because your browser doesn't support .webm streaming

 

I really want Source 2 and HL3. New Hammer Editor looks better than the old one.

 

It does look fantastic, but it's also very clearly geared towards making a DOTA or Warcraft type map. It's much easier to create intuitive and efficient workflows for specific games or types of game, but Unity has to be general-purpose. Unfortunately, a lot of useful design optimisations have to be sacrificed in the name of flexibility.