Isn’t that what half life is pretty much about, getting deviated to then realize that you were much more closer to your objective from the very beggining? We’ve got hostiles applies that very well.
So photobucket has suddenly taken a dislike to me, saying that I have exceeded the bandwidth limit for the month, and that it won’t reset for 17 days. Any suggestions for alternatives would be appreciated.
Seconded.
Noted. I’ve ported the complete overheads to imgur for the moment. I’ll work on chapters and individuals tomorrow when I get home from work.
Good to hear. That’s also good because imgur doesn’t force you to their website when you try to full screen or ‘view image’.
Photo Bucket didn’t used to do that either, I dunno when they started, but it’s dumb and annoying.
It’s like in LoTR, Frodo needs to bring the ring to Mount Doom… by foot, but Gandalf better called an Eagle to transport Frodo to Mount Doom, solved in one hour, instead of a journey which took months
This is really frigging cool, .RK! Thanks for doing this, I’ve spent quite a while just looking at it and trying to figure out what parts correspond with what maps. It’s amazing how massive Black Mesa is when you look at it like that. The map must be at LEAST 5 X 5 KM.
However, I think you’ve done Surface Tension wrong. If we compare how your ST looks to that ST overlay which is on the BM wiki, Black Mesa’s ST doesn’t overlap into itself at all like yours does. Maybe you’ve done it right, and I’m just having trouble seeing it properly due to how it overlaps FaF and Lambda Core, but I’m not sure! Might be worth a check though, comparing it to the map on the BM wiki.
If Surface Tension does overlap as horribly as it does in your overlay, that’s really interesting, seeing as one of the BM’s design principles seemed to be to totally prevent that! Not gonna lie, I was a little pleased when I saw your vanilla map overlaps itself a few times too during ST - I’d hate to think my mod causes a significant overlap, it would be really annoying, especially considering all the lengths I went to in order to prevent OaR from overlapping! I also found it interesting how ST/OAR Uncut (indirectly) prevents the Lambda Complex from being located directly underneath the QE Labs. Happy coincidence.
Also, I love how significant a portion of the entire map OaRU + Loop mod takes up! It’s like 1/3 of the overall game’s distance! Love it!
It’s also pretty hilarious how the tunnel at the start of Blast Pit is actually one of the the single biggest overall areas in the entire game. You’d never realize it in game.
I’d really love to see one of these overlays done with the 3D skyboxes rendered as well. I know it’s not possible, and I’m not asking you to do it, but it would be so damn cool if it WERE possible.
But yeah, seriously good job.
Oh, I guess I don’t need to port everything else to imgur, since the bandwidth thing seems to just affect external images. You can still view the pictures via hyperlink.
Yeah, the overlap is much less of a problem with STU installed. In stock Black Mesa, G actually u-turns and runs right back through E and F. Really though, the maps that are causing that overlap are B and D. If B was turned 90 degrees clockwise (so that you went east from the dam all the way to the cliff, and then traveled south on the cliff), and if the last part of D was a left hand turn instead of a right-hand turn, there wouldn’t be so much overlap.
Admittedly that would change the orientation of some maps and would require changing the sun angles for the rest of the game, but that’s easy.
The thing about the map on BMwiki is that whoever put it together didn’t really put the levels together (source: https://wiki.blackmesasource.com/File:Str_overlay.jpg) correctly. D, E, F, and G were kinda just thrown together there. That’s also why I made overheads for each individual map, so that anyone else could piece them together and (hopefully!) arrive at the same conclusion.
Personally, I’d do it anyway, if only for the reason getting to the full screened image just requires one click, instead of 4.
First off, thanks for doing these overlays and maps. As a map nerd, you have no idea how much joy it brings me to see the Black Mesa Research Facility mapped out like this! It’s really fascinating, and I’ve tried to do something similar in the past, but really got annoyed with all the tediousness of level overviews.
So your post here got me thinking about the truly amazing overlaps in Surface Tension, and I realized that one of the big problems that leads to this isn’t really B or D. It’s in the A map. If I’m not mistaken, in the original Half-Life after you traverse through the dam, you enter the the pipe to the D map on the right-hand side of the river valley. In Black Mesa, it’s the opposite, meaning you have parts of Surface Tension taking place on top of Questionable Ethics, and the Lambda Labs being under the QE labs. Making that assumption I decided to piece together my own map, trying to stay as close to the original as possible while still avoiding all level-overlap. This was the result:
Overall, the biggest warp is the end part of A. But as you can see, I also had to rotate the B map, as per your thoughts. From there, the C map is a bit awkwardly positioned - it connects with B and D, although perhaps a few inches off to give it a bit of room, otherwise the cliff face would be in the minefield and the first part of D would be hanging precariously off of the cliff itself… From there, I had to change the orientation of the E map to fit in TextFAMGUY’s stunningly overlap-free Surface Tension Uncut. Seriously, it’s glorious. From the entirety of E-I, I didn’t have to do anything to stitch the maps together - they fit perfectly. I’ve also put Forget About Freeman in there, simply because the G map of Surface Tension and the B map of Forget About Freeman fit together pretty well in this layout!
Dunno if you guys’ll be interested in this, but I’ll leave it here nonetheless since I spent an hour in GIMP getting the maps to piece together just right. 
The playable area is overlap free, but from memory, the skyboxes would overlap very badly. I’m not sure that’s fixable due to have huge some of them are, though!
I don’t have them all memorized, obviously, but from memory, the desert from Text’s G map would overlap the map above it where you encounter the LAV-25. The other desert from Text’s G map (the one with the air strip) overlaps FaF’s desert, and vice versa.
Yeah, the skyboxes overlap pretty badly, and it most cases, even the most tiresome amount of warping and formfitting won’t do anything to help it. I think I can make a couple edits, though:
What I’ve done is just try to create the illusion of everything fitting together nicely, by matching up the skyboxes based on what the player can directly see during game play. I also edited the map so that the desert vista of FaF looks out into an empty area, rather than directly back at Surface Tension, which probably works better. Also, I haven’t bothered to edit Lambda Core into here, but I think you would find that it fits nicely into the half-circle that bm_c2a5d - bm_c3a1b form. Which pretty well accents the idea that you’re essentially searching for the very last open entrance to the Lambda Complex throughout ST and FaF, before finally finding it at the very end of FaF.
All in all I think this layout matches up pretty well. It’s not perfect (skyboxes are proof of that), but I think it’s about as good as we’re gonna get seeing as how the ST and FaF skyboxes are so massive - as you pointed out.
What you’ve done there is pretty much as close as you can get it to perfect, actually. I’m pretty sure there’s no better way to fit the levels together than what you’ve done here, without significant editing of the 3D skyboxes, of course.
Most of the skyboxes would probably fit together decently on your map, on a visual/sense level.
Let me explain what I mean by that - it’s kinda hard to judge distance in a 3D skybox, because they stretch so far. It’s hard to tell the difference between 500m and 2km in a 3d skybox when you’re on the ground.
Assuming the player were able to keep a perfect mental picture of the layout, given your layout, I imagine they’d think there was no overlap, if all they had to go on was what they’d seen. Of course, the reality is different, but hopefully my point makes sense.
I do find it weird that ST/FaF overlap so badly, considering the BM Devs seemed to be so stringent elsewhere with preventing such overlaps. Ah well, it’s just one of those things. I wouldn’t expect them to fix it in all honesty, it’s a tonne of work to fix something the vast, vast majority of people wouldn’t notice. Heck, nobody would know at all without these composite maps!
I actually had no idea there was overlap in ST until shown this map. I was actually careful to make sure G/H/I didn’t overlap each other in STU, and I also tried (can’t remember if I succeeded or not) to stop them from overlapping with F. I just kinda assumed that the other maps didn’t overlap, because of F’s location relative to E.
And, really, that’s just the parts we can see. If we added the other mods (if we considered them canon), it could be much larger.
“This place is a lot bigger than I thought” indeed.
I recall a quote from near release that said pretty much exactly this - the BM devs didn’t care about actually making everything not overlap, because as long as there’s nothing too egregious, nobody’s going to notice. At first it turned me off, but I’ve come to agree; the only place in Half-Life 1 where I really noticed overlap while playing was the cliffside map in Surface Tension, which, as I recall, was fixed in BM.
I have two points to make about this. First off, I’d love to, some day, see a high-quality game taking place in a single location, such as BM, wherein there is no overlap whatsoever; everything would make just as much sense if it were one single map. Second off, I’d love to, some day, see a high-quality game taking place in a single location, such as BM, wherein overlap is done intentionally for psychological horror reasons, a la The Shining.
It depends where and how the maps overlap. Is it possible the maps overlap so badly because they had to unexpectedly cut Surface Tension short? Maybe they had planned it out better like you said, but had to stitch it together when their guy dropped and didn’t really worry about fixing the overlap?
Portal’s engine would be lovely for making ‘in-world overlap’. You could use the portals (not the glowing ones, the discreet ones placed by the mapper that you can’t see unless you noclip and look at the map from outside) to create impossible geometries! Or, you could use them to seriously disorient the player, by having doors that lead to other areas in the same map, but don’t match up at all.
I think the big problem there for in-world overlaps is this: it appears that it’s only in Portal 2 and possibly Left 4 Dead 2 (not sure about that one) and, thusly uses a version of Source that still closed. If you wanted to have this kind of “portal door”, you can only play it as a Portal 2 map.
Correct. Portal 2 at least has these entities called World Portals. You use them in Hammer much like any other entity. That’s not to say though that the devs could create a similar entity. It’s just a matter of coding the entity into the game, methinks.
But isn’t it the same setup from Portal, which is on EP2’s engine, which is obviously available? I’ve seen a video of it demonstrated in a Portal map, it looked pretty flawless.