Hammer (Portal 2 SDK Edition)
Windows 7 Professional 32bit Service Pack 1
Core i5 Mobile (5250) / 2.0GB RAM
Portal 2

Yeah, while I honestly don't know what to call them (chances are if I did, I'd have found it in the entity list...) but basically you know those nice blue lines and blue "checkmark" / orange "cross" you see next to things you should trigger, coming out of the things that activate them? How do I go about making those?

I'm just messing about in Hammer right now to learn it, made a box; leakbox; prop_testchamber_door; prop_button; set the inputs and all that nice (using a relay of course, for cleanliness); and did the whole "make a cylindar to cut the hole out of the wall for the door.." (took far too long....); now I'd like to show the nice line coming from my button and ending somewhere near the door, with the nice cross there to show that it's being activated.

http://i.imgur.com/njpZj.png

http://i.imgur.com/EitAF.png

Other questions I'm also going to ask soon (unless you want to answer here):
1. How do I cut that cylindar out of the wall... without doing it the crappy way I had to? (must be an easy way...?)
2. How do I increase the range at which textures are rendered and shadered in the 3d camera view of Hammer? Right now that's about as far away as I can be for the door to not be a pink rectangle.
3. Why does Hammer use 4.6G RAM when my ever-so-simple map is newly opened? This is especially concerning for me as this laptop only has 2G of RAM; the rest is being paged... Hammer runs incredibly slow because of the paging

Question 1:

• Go into the map zoo_mechanics
• Look at the wall that is placed around one of the doors
• Copy those 2 walls and group them together
• Paste them into your own map
• Build a frame around those walls

This is how Valve and I do it

Logic wrote:
Question 1:

• Go into the map zoo_mechanics
• Look at the wall that is placed around one of the doors
• Copy those 2 walls and group them together
• Paste them into your own map
• Build a frame around those walls

This is how Valve and I do it

Here I'd thought there'd be some sort of edge-carve for the individual entities... because yeah; that'd make it a whole lot easier in my opinion. Plus my computer can barely handle Hammer open with nothing in it at the moment, not sure how it'd handle opening a map that actually has content -_-.

Question 1 much better solved:
1. Open instances/door/portal_door_entities/portal_door_frame_black with Hammer
2. remove the black and yellow blockade in the middle (Valve destroyed it)
3. Save it as new file in a new ordner (like e.g. "myInstances")
4. Create a func_instance in your map
5. Choose the file you have just created for the instance

OR you can use my fully functional door instance.
(Either use it like it is or select it and then choose instances-->collapse in the Hammer menu)

cbroughton wrote:
Yeah, while I honestly don't know what to call them (chances are if I did, I'd have found it in the entity list...) but basically you know those nice blue lines and blue "checkmark" / orange "cross" you see next to things you should trigger, coming out of the things that activate them? How do I go about making those?

Indicator lights, they're called. Here's a good Youtube tutorial:

KSTIAkUrxsY

SolarChronus' videos helped me out no end when I was learning how to use Hammer.

They're called indicator lights.

1) Use the overlay tool to add an overlay, select a texture with the name indicator in it and apply it to a surface.
2) Give the info_overlay a name and remember it.
3) Create an env_texturetoggle, give it a name and give targetbrush the name of your indicator light overlay.
4) Let whatever activates the indicator light have <<input>>, <<name of texturetoggle>> settextureindex 1. And whatever deactivates <<input>>,<<name of texturetoggle>>, settextureindex, 0.

That should do.

Ps: If your computer can barely handle hammer and you're afraid to open zoo mechanics you might want to re-consider mapping. Hammer often eats more then 1 gb of ram, so it will get laggy...

The door becoming a pink rectangle can be fixed by increasing the model render distance. Go to tools > options > 3d views and increase model render distance.
However, if you're going to use hammer on your current computer you'd probably want to keep that distance low or use cordons. I doubt that will make hammer run smoothly for you, but at least it increases performance a bit.