EL405: Hammer Down

Thursday's workshop in Hammer was a really good time. Perhaps it was because we were able to produce an actual room to play with in a short amount of time, or maybe it was because Hammer runs in the beautiful Half-Life 2 engine; either way, it was fun.

Hammer's interface is much simpler and intuitive than Blender 3D, the open source modeling program we've recently worked in. Creating a room is as simple as drawing for walls, and assuming you aren't going for some French salon or Jazz-era speakeasy, the gritty textures Valve supplies with the program work just fine. After a few tutorials, we were able to fill our room with some zombies, a few shotguns, a smattering of grenades, and a couple pigeons, then we compiled our game and let the chaos unfold.

This, of course, begs the comparison: is Hammer a better product because it was made by a company, rather than an open source project?

It's a debate that one could write research papers, blog entries, and books on... but for this small instance, I would argue yes. I am a semi-supporter of open source: it is great for some things, and awful for others. There is a certain amount of commitment and knowledge required for open source software, and there is also an air of pretentiousness. Open source software is generally made by a collective group of people who all share the same passion for customization, coding and making things the way they want them. This is great, except that it usually means open source software is unintuitive and complex for the average user.

A prime example has been Blender 3D, a 3D modeling program that manages to be extremely powerful and frustratingly muddled all at the same time. The interface is cramped, vague, and obtuse. Most of the buttons are abbreviated, and if you want to actually function in the 3D space, you need to know over a dozen keyboard shortcuts. At the same time, the program can do a heck of a lot, including craft an entire game engine or CGI animation. We performed exercises in this program first, and I found myself often getting frustrated with the two-button mousing system and the constant use of keyboard shortcuts. The programs biggest advantage is its ability to output the final product to a number of other programs, including high-end 3D modeling software like 3D Studio Max and Maya.

When we finally got to Hammer, after jumping through a hoard of anti-piracy hoops in Valve's Steam software, we found a program that was easy to use and very, very fun. Hammer is a slick piece of corporate software that is both very powerful and very user-friendly. The people at Valve worked hard to make this SDK as accessible as possible so that people could mod like crazy, and it shows. It reminded me alot of another easy 3D modeling tool: SketchUp. Hammer operated like so many other graphics programs (alot of Adobe software comes to mind): you have a toolbar to the left which features all the items and selection tools you may need, and on the right are palettes for various details and properties of the items in the game world. This sort of setup, that mirrors other popular software, allows users to get into the program faster because they feel this sense of familiarity. Hammer's biggest downfall, really, was the fact that it can't output to formats outside of Half-Life. Granted, this is a tool to create mods for Half-Life, so I guess you shouldn't expect much beyond that.

You could compare and contrast corporate software to open source software until you are blue in the face, but in the battle of Hammer vs Blender... Hammer smashed the competition into pieces.