FAQ

Source Level Editor 2.104

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Source Level Editor?

Source Level Editor (SLE) is a custom edited version of Hammer 4.1. It is not meant to be a radical overhaul of Hammer, rather, it iterates and adds polish to the basic workflow to make mapping experience smoother, more consistent, expanded and, in some areas, automated.
Development of SLE started in November 10, 2020.

What are SLE's highlights?

SLE's main areas of improvements are brush & entity workflow, working with displacements and textures, and revisions of user interface (UI).

Tool improvements:

• All Block Tool primities are previewed before creation, including preview of arches and toruses;
• 3-Point clipping is added, allowing for freeform clipping at any angle;
• Face Edit Tool supports growing selection by angle and texture skewing (a.k.a. shearing);
• Displacement Tool supports free dragging of vertices, 45° angle XY sculpting axis, fixed Face Normal axis;
• Vertex Edit Tool supports XYZ transform for vertices and collapsing edges with the Delete key;
• Material Browser includes Favourites materials list specified per-game;
• Sound Browser now supports parsing soundscapes for selecting them;
• Model Browser now displays attachments and can filter out Only Used models;

Render improvements:

• SLE can display both regular skybox and 3D Skybox;
• Material Proxies work in 3D View;
• Several visual entities have previews, such as beams and spotlights;
• Rendering of Tool Textures and Editor Objects is toggleable;

UI improvements:

• Hotkeys are now defined in an external, user-editable file and can be reassigned for every supported command;
• Customisable 2D and 3D colours (such as grid lines, the void, selected objects, instances) can be configured in the Options;
• Run Map Dialogue (non-Expert) has been expanded with common compile options;
• Numerous tool and config dialogues have been cleaned up and/or expanded;

Stability improvements:

• Multiple crash bugs, performance slowdowns and limits from the original Hammer have been dealt with.

The full spreadsheet of features and changes can be found on Google Sheets: link.

What games does SLE support?

Fully supported games are:

• Half-Life 2 and its Episodes;
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch;
• Source SDK Base 2013 games and mods;
• Portal;
• Team Fortress 2;
• Day of Defeat: Source;
• Counter-Strike: Source.

Essentially, as SLE is built off of 2013 branch of Hammer 4.1, all Source 2013 games should be supported.

Games with untested/likely very limited support (or lack of any support) include:

• Garry's Mod;
• Alien Swarm;
• Left 4 Dead 1&2;
• Games on older Source branches.

Unsupported games include Portal 2, CS:GO and anything newer.

What are SLE's minimum system requirements?

The min reqs it's been tested on are Windows XP 32bit, Pentium 4 3.00 GHz, 3GB RAM, 512MB VRAM, and 1024x768 screen resolution.
Not all UI elements may fit fully/comfortably by default on 1024x768, requiring user adjustment.