Does hammer crash a lot for you people too? Like when using CTRL + Z, duplicating entities, naming things, selecting models for props…
Hammer is the tool that made me love CTRL + S so much that I use it all the time, for every program.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a session of using Hammer without at least one unexplainable crash. Usually it happens when I’m opening or saving the properties of something.
What sucks is that it’s usually when I haven’t saved in a little while, and loading Hammer autosaves makes it crash too.
Oh Hammer, you lovely piece of programming.
I’ve had it crash on me a few times for seemingly no reason. Not frequently, but it’s happened.
The most obnoxious crashes were with the Left 4 Dead branch of Hammer - I’m not entirely sure why, but it doesn’t like me having a tablet display as my second monitor. Checking any entity’s flags tends to make Hammer crash altogether, unless I unplug my tablet before launching it in the first place. Kinda arbitrary, but workable, I suppose.
For BM Hammer, I’ve only had it crash on me when working on an already cluttered level (e.g. adding an area to a map like bm_c2a2a).
Hammer is fickle as fudge. It has a tendency to crash for no discernible reason. I usually notice it when applying something in the properties box or ctrl+t’ing.
Usually when I click a few too many times. Or applying properties, or displacements.
I literally CTRL+S every minute.
Ctrl+S every minute? Are you kidding? You should be hitting Ctrl+S every time you make a single edit.
That also applies to every other application that’s based around load-save file edits, not just Hammer. You really should just save all your open files every time you so much as even briefly pause. It makes life so much easier. Gone are the days when hard drives were terrible and excruciatingly slow, so you really shouldn’t be afraid of doing that for literally everything you do.
…Unless you’re saving to an SSD. Don’t want to use up the writes too soon, after all.
Not true with modern ssds. You’ll wear out a thousand keyboards before an ssd would fail.
Sounds like Hammer is fickle.
If you somehow manage to wear out an SSD due to spamming Ctrl+S in Hammer, you have a terrible SSD. Either that, or your fingers would be destroyed because you have just spent the past week spamming Ctrl+S at inhuman speeds without any breaks for food, drink, or sleep.
Or, more reasonably, you got hired for a new full-time, 9-5 Mon-Fri job in which you did nothing but spam Ctrl+S in Hammer at inhuman speeds nonstop for the past month. But on the bright side, you got weekends off.
I can already hear it. Somewhere, in an NYC office building, an eerie buzzing emanates from an open window.
This buzzing, when slowed down to 0.005x speed digitally, becomes a fast, audible keypress.
The door to the office is locked. Nobody enters, nobody leaves. Rumors fly around the building about the soul trapped in Office 21-B, eternally saving Hammer. Nobody knows what the level is, but some speculate that it’s a single map from Ricochet 2.
Well I was going to say every 10 seconds (or whenever I make a change), which is what I normally do, but I figured people might go and argue about how ridiculous that is. It seems no one else thinks it’s ridiculous so the truth is out haha
On smaller maps I mash it idly constantly, whether I’ve made changes or not.
Once maps are large or complex enough that saving actually takes time, I tend to give it a couple minutes so I don’t spend more time saving than working.
Fun Fact: Hammer VMF file has a “mapversion” parameter that logs everytime how many times you save your map file.
I have saved 4000 times on one of my map according to the parameter. I should work harder.
On topic, yeah, always save. Hammer crashing - it means it’s working as intended. Sometimes I save and it crash, but then I wanna undo the action I’ve done. But still most of time it’s much better to save and then worry about the consequences, not the other way around.
Highest HC map is 8579 
Without taking into consideration the few times that we vmfmerged, of course. So that number might be a smidge inaccurate, depending on which map it was.
Nice to see that it’s not only for me the hammer madness is going on.
Oh and that bug where your model browser freezes and you have to reopen it again…
And today I had a bug where the vertex tool just simply refused to select vertex points. Gotta love hammer.
Dude, the model viewer one sucks like crazy. I think it’s triggered if you click in the 3D viewport before opening the model viewer, possibly w/ 3D handles enabled (X) as well. Gotta close out, click in the 2D view and repoen. Total trash.
My god I really hate that bug. I really hate that one so mcuh.
Sometimes when I open properties of an entity or brush, it opens up half way and the screen freeze. But the annoying part is that hammer is still interactable - you can move around but cant do anything because the properties tab is keep opening. Oh god…
I like how this little thread started out as a smalll question and grew up quickly about ranting about Hammer. We needed this kind of thread anyway to ease our anger and pain of Hammer…
Hammer is a terrible piece of software.
But we will learn to love it
Because it is still somehow better than most other level editors out there.