"immediate playability of a created game without the lengthy wait for compiling
This is a big draw for me. I been mucking around with Hammer for Half-life 2 and I feel I am back in 1998 again. I have a P3 3.0 machine for mapping with a gig of ram and it still can take up to a hour to BSP, VIS and RAD a map. I just can't be bothered anymore when other engines ( Farcry, Doom 3 and Unreal ) can get a map up and running in less than 5 mintues."
I agree. I been waiting forever to make my mod with HL2. I started up hammer today and I though, what a mess!. I didn't like the editor at all. I used to work on Serious Sam. It's map editor is like farcry. Make a map and run it, none of the compiling stuff.
If you add up all those compile times when you are mapping, that is a heck of a lot of wasted time. You could make two maps in Serious Sam in that same amount of time.
Can you tell I am considering going back to Serious Sam?