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Jackhammer 1.0 Public Alpha - New Level Editor
Jackhammer is a brand new level editor for games with a quake-style BSP architecture. The aim is to develop a convenient cross-platform tool capable of incorporating the best features of existing editors, such as Valve Hammer Editor, Q3Radiant and others. Despite Quake and Half-Life having been released a long time ago, the large community have arisen around, still developing mods and games on their bases. However the existing editors suffer from fundamental disadvantages their users are well familiar with. Jackhammer does aspire to be the universal level design tool for classic games. But not only the classics! The editor shall become a key development tool for the Volatile3D II engine, that is why its second name is Volatile Development Kit.

Jackhammer is being developed since August 2013, that means the editor is very young. But the team of professional programmers and testers is ready to present the public alpha within four months. Despite not all the functions being implemented, not all the planned games being supported and only a small extent of the new ideas being realized, today you are able to download, install and evaluate Jackhammer in action. Please don't forget that alpha is the first, quite a raw version, and may contain some issues. We are interested in a vast testing of the editor and grateful in advance for your comments and suggestions! In addition, you can provide Jackhammer with financial support, donating funds for the further development.

This version supports Quake, Quake II and Half-life.

Web page
Features

DOWNLOAD - Win32 now, Linux in future.

Quoth FGD for Jackhammer

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Is There Any Chance Of A Mac OS X Version? 
 
Maybe 
But not on the priority list.
I don't even know a man who makes maps for these games and uses Mac OS X as a primary OS. 
There Are Some 
but not many, yes. Although, shouldn't that just be a matter of compiling for OS X, since you're using QT? Or are there non-portable parts of your codebase? 
 
Yep, there are some platform specific parts that do not rely on Qt. Not much, but still important.
Btw, Qt also has some OS-specific issues that should be carefully avoided, and that is what native tests are needed for. 
Niiiiiice..... 
This is starting to look very appealing to a Worldcraft/Hammer user like myself... 
I See 
Well, if you decide to release an OS X version, I can do some testing. Would be interesting to see what the competition is up to ;-). 
 
^^Karate Tiger soundtrack in the background... 
There Is No Competition At All 
Jackhammer can only compete with other modern VHE clones, and AFAIK there are none supporting Q1 and/or Q2.
People that aren't stuck to VHE firmly probably don't find this editor useful. And c'est la vie. 
I Was Only Half Serious ;-) 
I'm really happy that there are still other people working on editors for Quake 1, and I support any attempt to bringing those editors to as many platforms as possible. 
Spirit The Weird Is Here 
Can you please tag your release files with the version number? For example:

jackhammer_alpha_win32_.exe -> jackhammer_alpha_1.0.155_win32.exe

jackhammer_alpha_linux.run -> jackhammer_alpha_1.0.155_linux.run

And for proper timestamps it would be ace if you did not use content-disposition but plain and simple normal downloads. :P 
Xfce, Arch: Some Warning Or Error Was Printed But All Seems Fine 
Installing Jackhammer 1.0.155 to: "/home/me/captain/jack"
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
Copying files...
Generating desktop file...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
All done. Thank you for installing Jackhammer.
./install.sh: line 89: return: can only `return' from a function or sourced script



When I try to launch jackhammer.sh I get "error while loading shared libraries: libQtCore.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" but I do have "/usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4 " (which is libQtCore.so.4.8.5). 
What Is Your Linux Distribution? 
Please replace in jackhammer.sh the following line:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$dirname
with:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$dirname
Did this help? 
 
Strange text parsing on the board...
The replacement certainly must be:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH : $dirname 
It Just Truncates Any Long Words, So 
put spaces in long strings of characters :) 
Fixed. 
(!) 
Thanks! 
Then post #40 can be probably deleted. 
 
I finally sat down and tried it. I have to say that as a Radiant user, it is quite hard to get used to this editor. Radiant feels more efficient to me.

I'm still glad I tried it. 
Revenge Of The Water Closet! 
This looks exceptional, DLing it now. 
Texure Brightness Setting!!! 
After all the years.


Thank you 
Colored Lights 
Neat feature I found. The editor uses a light bulb sprite instead of a box. The bulb changes color with the RGB entered in the _color key GREAT! 
 
If there were no sprite, the light entity (solid octahedron) would also change color depending on its color key. That's similar to Radiant's behavior. 
Token Too Large Error During Compile (no Bsp Generated) 
This is caused by not allowing for over a certain number of .wad files. Hammer allows up to 5, apparently Jackhammer only allows for 1. Ideally the number should essentially be unlimited but realistically 10 should be more than enough.

I like to segregate my textures into categories. For example generic (hint, skip, clip, trigger, solid black and so on) skies and liquids, animated, blue and grey, brown and green, tech (or base) and so on. Mainly this is to keep from having repeat textures in the texture browser without having to make a custom wad file for each map ahead of time. 
What Compilers Are You Using? 
Jackhammer allows for as many WAD files as you wish. However Q1 compilers distributed with Jackhammer (that are capable of handling map format 220) can't read more than 1 wad file, this is a limitation of original Id's Quake compilers. 
 
I used it as you guys "Shipped" it. I'll try it with a different set of tools, probably tyranns as they seem to be the most up to date (although I know that a lot of people stand by TXQBSP). You might want to do the same on your next release (or at least cover that in the documentation). I already have an updated FGD file for Hammer that uses all of the extra features in those tools such as sunlight (angle, color and intensity keys added to the Worldspawn) and func_detail brushes plus it can use hint and skip textures. I can just copy and paste those entries into the provided Jackhammer FGD.

Also for some reason the "Studio" option in the FGD isn't working for me but it may be at my end as I have it running on an older laptop without good shader support (plus I really don't need that feature anyway but I though that I'd mention it as long as I'm commenting on the editor anyway).

None of these things are deal killers but as you move on out into beta they should probably get addressed as they are really simple "Fixes". 
It Would Be Easy To Add Support For Multiple WADs 
But our coder that works on compile tools is too busy. He promised to add this support one day, but I'm not sure he meant "in 2014".
What do you mean by "Studio option isn't working"? There are several reasons why models are not displayed, the most common are mentioned in the FAQ. Console window should contain the details: at least, there will be errors if the editor can't load models. 
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