Did anyone say scripting?

You get to wear a lot of hats when you design levels and as it turns out, I'm very well versed in programming. It has helped me a lot in scripting some of the more complicated levels but there was no reason to stop there. I've been able to apply my knowledge on improving an engine's toolset for everyone and it was just as useful. To be the best, you need the best tools! Here are some of the tools I've been working on to assist me in my level design adventures.

CompilePal

CompilePal is one of those tools that asks a simple question. "What if, we could automate most of the tasks required to compile and publish a level?". Well, the answer would be CompilePal. It seemed impossible at first but we've taken every step of the process, steps that had been done by hand for over a decade, and figured out ways to completely automate them. That includes building navigation meshes, baking reflections and most of all, a system that automatically builds a dependency tree of a level's interdependent assets and packages them neatly for distribution. To top it off we even automated compression, your level is now ready to ship. We have automated to a single click a process that, in some cases, could take up to a whole day. We've come a long way and now level designers are able to iterate faster than ever. We're very proud to be able to say that There's the Source engine before CompilePal, and then there's Source after CompilePal.

Vmmc

Or the Valve Map Manifest Collapser

Source is a weird engine, The level editor is chock full of features but sometimes, those features are simply not supported by the level compiler. VMMC aims to add support for some those features by preprocessing files for the compiler. In this case, we needed a tool to adds support for the editor's capability to chop levels into submaps and instances. As it turns out, being able to divide a level into smaller pieces is really crucial to achieving good version control. Having multiple smaller files means we can have better tracking of changes and allows us to have more concurrent designers working on the same level. This tool really needed to happen since the community is starting to team up to build bigger and better.

Vradfix

Source's static lighting has been known to have weird issues. You can end up with lighting bleeding into areas where it shouldn't be or maybe you'll end up with weird artifacts, you never know. The bad part is that often times, there's no real solution to fixing it. For those special times when you're out of options, I've developed a lightmap editor. For any given surface, the tool enables you to edit the color and brightness on its lightmap.