The program can be downloaded here. Visit here if you wish to support the development.
Both HammerPatch.dll and HammerPatchLauncher.exe should go in the same directory as hammer.exe. This will be in the bin directory of each Source game. Examples:
- steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Source\bin\
- steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\bin\
Instead of using hammer.exe to start, you should now use HammerPatchLauncher.exe.
This will not magically fix existing corrupted brushes, it will only have a change on new brushes that were saved with this.
Now when you save a map with HammerPatch loaded, it will create additional files next to the VMF. The .hpverts file contains the vertex data in binary form and the .hpvertstext contains a human readable representation. Only the binary file is used by the program.
In default Hammer, unless your geometry is of perfectly straight angles, the vertices will move every time you open the map. This is because the vertices' positions are recalculated every time from plane points. This is a lossy process and will only get worse every time the map is loaded.
In HammerPatch, all vertices are saved separately and are restored on load to overwrite Hammer's estimations. Here are some images that illustrate this problem.
Say you have a simple default primitive. This is a cylinder with 32 sides.
In default Hammer, this is what you'd see if you zoom in on such primitive after loading a map of one iteration.
Here's the same shape but when saved and loaded with HammerPatch. It is the exact same vertices as it was created with.
This problem gets more problematic on advanced shapes.
Again, this is what it looks like in default Hammer after one save iteration.
The same map as saved and loaded by HammerPatch.
