I was looking to browse the stock particles to add a few effects to a map I’m working on, but after launching the game with the -tools -nop4 command from Hammer, none of the tools showed up at all. I figured this was a problem from launching via Hammer, and launched the game directly from Steam with the same command line prompts, with no results.
This is a very big issue, because it not only prevents community developers from browsing, editing, and creating new particles and commentary, but also prevents Crowbar Collective from doing the same - And with Xen and (presumably) some of the MP maps still under development, I figure that that’s kind of an important feature to have.
This wouldn’t be such an issue if PCF files were easily human-readable, or if there was an external tool for viewing their contents, but without the -tools flag doing anything ingame, there’s currently no way to even see what particles are available.