Tutorial One- Introduction To HL-CS Mapping

 

So you have found yourself wanting to delve into the joys of worldcraft and making yourself some cs maps?

Well you have found the right place. It won't be easy but with the help of these tutorials you will be able to go and develop your skills and get a your maps looking amazing.

First up you need to get the tools of the trade. The following things that you will need are:

· A copy of Valve Hammer Editor 3.4
· Zoners Compile Tools
· Any PAK explorer

All these can be downloaded from right here at cs-maps but another great site for utilities is www.valve-erc.com.

Ok once you have all of these installed on your machine you are ready to begin on the long journey of that first map.

Right first thing is to get the Zoners Compile Tools extracted to the directory where Valve Hammer Editor exists. Mine is the default C:\program files\Valve Hammer Editor. I will refer to that through the tutorial so keep that in mind.

Ok once that is done go ahead and boot up the Editor. It will ask you if you want help setting up the editor, say yes to this and a help dialog will appear.

Follow that through carefully until you get the build programs part. Now this part of Valve Hammer Editor (VHE) is where we tell the program what tools to compile our lovely maps with. The ones that the tutorial tells you to use are the useless default ones that the editor comes with. This is where we put Zoners Compile Tools into the mix.

Ok so you should have something like this:

Now ignore the one the Help file instructs you to do and instead look for the compile tools that have a HL in front for example HLCSG.exe

Now once you have done that you should have something looking like this:

Ok that was the hard bit done. Now just a quick word on the texture set-up.
The textures are stored in WAD files and you add these into the editor to allow you to use them on walls, ceilings and the like.

If you want to be able to browse the wads then get yourself a copy of wally, either from cs-maps or again www.valve-erc.com

I use:
halflife.wad- every texture from the game
decals.wad- burn marks, blood and bullet holes
liquids.wad- all the liquids from the game

I use that as my base set-up. If you want to add another wad that someone has used in CS then simply go to the cstrike folder and add away.

If you are confused, I am talking about this part of the set-up:

Ok now you can relax. After all that confusing set-up you can now get down to what you came here for. Making maps!

Click OK to get rid of the options and now you have a blank editor staring straight back at you.

Ok click File->New

You should have this on your screen now.

If you have never used VHE before then now I STRONGLY suggest you go back into the Help file and read the Users Guide section to familiarize yourself with the menu icons and the concept of editing. This will help you understand about editing in general, and make these tutorials clearer.

Ok once you have done that (you have right?) move on to the next tutorial which will be making that all important first room.

By Blink