This ZIP file contains the many of the tools Valve used to build the game Half-Life. Most are derived from Quake 1 tools released by id Software (c).
Warning: these programs are fairly raw, with little to no user interface and quite often terse of just plain misleading error messages. They are also extremely fussy about directory structures, and have hundreds of idiosyncrasies that will surely drive most users mad.
On the positive side, these pretty much are the tools we used to build Half-Life so at least in theory they possibly can be made to work, it's just not easy and requires a lot of arcane knowledge that no one has ever written down. Hopefully, at some point, someone will actually will write it down so it doesn't take the super-human efforts of world-class level designers and animators to create content, but for now quit complaining, we're giving it away for free so you're certainly getting your moneys worth.
BSPINFO: dumps memory/resource usage for a .bsp
QCSG: turns a .map into the simplest .bsp, this shouldn't take much time at all.
QBSP2: cuts up the map into the BSP data structure. This is also the point where it'll start to complain about pissy little details that the level editor should have caught but didn't.
VIS: figures out what part of your level can see what other part of your level. This is usually pretty fast, but it can also take a fair bit of time depending on how complicated you map is, and it can also get stuck on seemingly trivial things and never finish so if your map isn't all the big and it's taking what you think is way way too long, go ahead and stop the program and make random changes to your map in the hopes that it'll magically fix it. On the other hand, maybe it'll finish if you just have some patience and wait a little longer and if you make any more changes to your map it really will break so you better not touch it after all. What fun!
QRAD: figures out how light bounces from light source to surface, then figures out how light bounces from every point on every surface to every point on every other surface, etc. etc. This program is a major memory pig. If it starts to swap - your HD light comes on and it starts to sound like someone's playing castanets inside your computer - then you should probably give up and stop the program and make your map smaller and/or scale up your textures 'cause it'll just take too long to get anywhere. You can either keep the levels small, or do what we did and only buy computers with 512MB of RAM.
QLUMPY: turns groups of 8-bit BMP files into a single large file containing all the textures (this is called a WAD file).
MAKELS: reads a directory tree and automatically builds a script for qlumpy.
SMDLEXP: exports our intermediate model format (SMD) from 3DStudio Max 2.x and Character Studio 2.x (tm). It's really fussy about the exact order you created the model and the exact ways you connected the bones to the skin and the exact way you named all your textures, etc. etc. If you don't exactly follow the example models and you try to do anything fancy in 3DStudio it'll never export correctly and good luck trying to figure out why. On the plus side, this version is greatly improved over the 3DStudio Max 1.2 version we used to develop Half-Life.
STUDIOMDL: reads a QC file and takes bunches of SMD files and compresses them into one or more MDL files. The MDL files are the actual model files that Half-Life understands.
