I've been having some issues getting it to work. Firstly, you fire up Source SDK, then make a config for Empires on Source Multiplayer. That's pretty straight forward. Then you try to start it and you get some weird sound_manifest error. To fix that, you need to go to your SVN and and open gameinfo.txt, and change the gameappID or whatever from 17740 to 218. Then you can actually open HLMV. But now, once in HLMV, you can see all the model folders and whatnot. But try actually opening them and you'll get an error message telling you that they don't exist. This is as far as I've managed to get, so if anyone thinks they have any ideas, throw them out there or give it a shot yourself, because I really need HLMV working.
The model viewer in Hammer hasn't been working for months now - pressing Browse just shuts down hammer completely.
Does it work for any other mods/games such as Hl2, Obsidian Conflict, etc? Because then you could do the shitty workaround of copying the models/materials to the other games folders. EDIT: I can confirm that it works for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive SDK.
Tried that, can't get the models to appear, the screen is just black. But I kinda need to use HLMV so I can tell what's wrong with the actual model from a mod-loading perspective. Basically, the world model for the new Shotguns isn't working, and I have absolutely no idea why.
I got the models to work in crafty (sort of, they don't show any textures). The model is basically showing out side of the model viewer's camera just press the arrow keys until you can see it. EDIT: I think I understand now, the source sdk in the steam tools menu is for orange box, what you need to use is source sdk 2013 but that has to be built from the source code. All the steampipe games have the binaries for the sdk tools inside it's bin folder. Just give me a while and I will look into this further. EDIT2: Finally got it working using the source sdk inside: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer\bin\hlmv.exe" But, it won't work if you have any system or user environment variables set relating to the old source sdk. Also the correct version of hammer for source 2013 is in this folder too. To summarise don't use the Source SDK inside steam's tools menu as it isn't compatible with the new engine any more. I might post a tutorial for getting source sdk to work with empires if other people have problems.
I have a short cut link to run the viewer directly. On my system it is "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Half-Life 2\bin\hlmv.exe" This also works if called from within Blender. Hammer is no good though. So I just run the view out side of hammer.