Modding: December 2006 Archive Page

Hammer, 3D Design, and the Virtues of Minimalism (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For the past month, as preparation for teaching a brief Hammer unit in my "New Media Projects" course, I got pretty good at Hammer basics -- in part because I recorded a series of Flash tutorials, and doing so really solidified some basic design skills.

I hadn't really realized just how comfortable I'm becoming with Hammer until yesterday, when I roughed out this interior while my daughter was napping. Today (during another nap) I added some special effects (including snow, not visible in this photo). I had already sketched out the floor plan on paper, so it was really quite easy to implement it.



I'd have gotten a lot farther today, but for some reason when I loaded it up Hammer couldn't find where I had placed the custom textures that I had downloaded. I recall being so frustrated with the numerous steps I had to do in order to get a new texture into Hammer that I never even tried to teach that to my students. But at least now I think I understand the complex file system that Steam creates. (I'm also starting to max out my laptop's hard drive. Time to do some file-shuffling.)

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with lighting (I have four lights in the fireplace -- three of them flickering in different colors and a fourth that's a steady yellow-orange). I had made an automatic door a few months ago, and it only took me a few tries to refresh my memory.

When my students began programming text adventures in Inform 7, it took a while for them to learn that every concrete object they mention in the description of a room ("The professor's bookshelf is cluttered with a bewildering array of papers, notebooks, reference books, and letters.") means that the player is going to want to take, read, examine, smell, eat, and burn every one of them. To implement each and every object in a cluttered study would take forever, but mentioning an object by name and then refusing to let the player interact is sort of cruel to the player. Rather than come up with a long list of things that the player will want to interact with, it's better to write a general description that reveals the character of the person who uses the study. A player who reads "Everything is a bit tweedy and fussily organized, but just a bit sloppy around the edges, not unlike Prof. Sneedlewood himself. An ivory-handled letter opener catches your eye." will immediately take the letter opener, but will probably not bother trying to rifle through the professor's things.

In a similar way, while creating an environment with pixels rather than words, I've learned that instead of open (bare) shelves I should probably instead have more closed cupboards, with just a few decorative items to personalize the space.

Hammer (the Half-Life 2 map editor) is good for constructing anything that you could build out of wood in real life. While the world allows for subtle and complex motion and beautifully interactive physics (hinges, ropes, gravity, friction, etc.), the resolution of the world-builder is chunky and blocky.

I've got a kind of creative vision, too, but I've been frustrated by how restricted I feel when there isn't a good ready-made texture (the 3D colors that go on the flat surfaces) or model (the map of points and planes that make up an object, such as a chair). So I've spent too much time online surfing for ready-made models and materials.

I have taught myself Blender3D and am working with the XSI Mod tool, so I know I've got everything I need to design complex objects and import them into a Hammer map.

Your mission is one of the most important mission that has taken place every year for hundreds of years. This mission requires you to do the impossible: DELIVER PRESENTS TO ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS ALL OVER THE WORLD. You must position your distribution system before Christmas Eve. It's Christmas, and everybody wins. But maybe - just maybe - you can show your generosity the most. --DEFCON Chirstmas Mod (Kotaku)

I love it when the children cheer and stats pop up showing how many happy children there are in the target city... Merry Christmas!

We started laughing, and I forgot that I didn't like this and that I'd rather be doing something else. We worked together and never actually hit a point where we couldn't make things work on our own. It was a nice, independent sort of feeling (which is a feeling that has been quite rare for me in this course). We actually got through two of the tutorials (out of five... even though the second one was kind of short).

Now, in relating this experience to blogging all I'm trying to say is that I went from resisting the idea to being okay with it. --Karissa Kilgore --EL405 Hammering away (Sugarpacket)

One of my students blogs about her experience using Hammer (the game modding tool that comes with Half-Life 2).

I've actually had dreams that all of my students were happily modding away, and then in the middle of the dream I've noticed that I was dreaming, so that when I woke up and realized I haven't yet passed this hurdle I would get all worried and get out of bed and revise the tutorials again.

The chance to teach a course like this was one of the main reasons I wanted to come here in the first place. So I've been preparing for this day for a long time. I do wish we could have had this moment earlier in the semester, so that students would have had the chance to play with Hammer before they had to commit to their final term projects, but at least they will have the experience.

Karissa is a top-notch English literature major who long ago mastered the undergraduate academic essay. I could see that she was a bit flustered by the "New Media Projects" course, which is the strangest English course I've ever taught, since it involves object-oriented programming, 3D design, and learning lots of different interfaces.

The method behind my madness is the idea that a "new media" expert should not simply know whatever counts as "new media" at the moment they take a new media class. I hope that the class prepares them to make sense of holographic cranial implants and whatever else counts as new media long after iPods and HD-TVs are in museums alongside Hi-Fi sets and 8-track tape players.

Yes, of course it's necessary to be able to produce something substantial in a way that begins to unlock the power of a particular tool, but I also want students to focus on what they do when they confront a new medium.

We've written interactive fiction, created Flash animations, built objects out of cubes and spheres, and -- today -- followed some tutorials that show the students, step by step, how to create a simple map for Half-Life 2 using Hammer.

The course has been an exhausting blast.

Lately the class has mostly been workshop days, where the students work on their individual projects, and all I do is circulate and help them. Since it's not a coding class, and I'm not really expecting them to master any of the software tools that the course touches on, I have no problem helping them through rough spots by coding certain features for them.

On a typical workshop day, I sweep through the room, one moment pointing out a typo on a student's page, helping a different student figure out how to get an interactive fiction game to recognize "ascend" as a command meaning "climb stairs," then helping another student make an invisible button increment a score variable the first time it is pushed (but only the first time), then suggesting that another student begin his presentation by asking the reader to answer some questions and personalizing the content based on the assumptions the reader holds, to helping a lantern-jawed time-traveling librarian punch penguins in a Flash animation.

The students have been great.

Because the course introduced some widely different tools, everyone has gravitated towards the tool that they find most interesting and/or most useful. The students took to Inform 7 and Flash more easily than I thought they would, and while they did make some good progress with The Games Factory 2, it wasn't a tool that anybody chose to use for their final project. The students liked a book that introduced Flash as a journalism tool, and I think that the next time I teach the course, I would probably drop Games Factory 2 and instead add a different book that introduces Flash as a tool for game programming.

I had the Hammer tutorials ready almost a month ago, but it took us some behind-the-scenes wrangling to figure out how to get Steam (a resource-heavy game-delivery utility that must do something important but I couldn't tell you exactly what) to work in a computer classroom where the workstations were locked down pretty tightly.

When we got past the first two or three places where I had become accustomed to seeing error messages, I warned the people around me know that I was starting to feel pretty good and that I was getting the urge to hug someone... and when it actually did make it past a certain point where I felt confident I could handle the rest of it, I actually did hug the two IT employees who had come by to help troubleshoot.

I've scheduled another Hammer workshop for next Tuesday. The Hammer tutorials are already finished and posted. (I used a free tool called Wink to capture hundreds of screen images, which I then annotated in order to form a step-by-step tutorial.)

I have of course the usual crushing load of papers to mark and the usual issues with freshmen who are panicking now that they realize that the choices they made earlier in the term really will affect the grades they can hope to muster at the end of term. Today I said "no" to several freshmen who asked -- at the last minute -- for special treatment that I thought was unreasonable.

But I'm still on a high from the Hammer class.