An Inaccurate Map

[Admiral_Sakai]

The last of the multiplayer maps that I actually need to place is also my personal vote for the most interesting- dm_crossfire.

Looking at the general structure of the facility, it seems to have a lot in common with the center-east of the facility- it’s an older, more industrial mixture of cinderblock buildings and concrete bunkers, there’s Gasworks-style metal structures in the skybox, and the view out over the desert shows a flatter, less mountainous landscape similar to what was visible from the airstrip.

The actual map is… well, square. Judging by the shadows the two “halves” are oriented east-to-west or west-to-east, but the gasworks-style buildings are at the ‘head’ of the cinderblock section and it’s fairly obvious that despite the area supposedly being placed horizontally on the eastern side of the base there is not a lot of facility on the exposed side (at the bottom of the picture up above):

There is also not a lot of facility visible beyond the gasworks structures off to the left, but this is pretty much impossible to see from the areas of the map that would normally be accessible so I don’t feel at all held to maintaining that.

Now, I had a good idea of exactly where I wanted Crossfire to go- overtop of the cliff the player wanders up and down across in bm_c2a5c. The way that the ground drops off very sharply on the bottom section of the map (and the proximity of what appear to be minefields) immediately brought that area to mind, and more to the point there is this small bunker sitting off to the side of the dropoff that’s oriented exactly like the one poking out on top of the cliff beside the big mixing tank in bm_c2a5c:

The only problem is that there is not, in fact, a bunker near the large mixing tank on the cliff face, or anywhere else in bm_c2a5c for that matter:

I don’t know why I thought there was. There’s no bunker there; there never has been a bunker there. And yet, I can still picture it, plain as day, on top of the cliff face just to the right of the big mixing tank with the two pipes coming out of it. Weird.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think having Crossfire directly on top of Cliffside would have worked, simply because we can see over the edge of Crossfire and while there are certainly similarities it is clearly not the same view as from Cliffside. So I started thinking that instead that while Crossfire’s bottom portion definitely does face out over the cliff vista, it does so either substantially to the north or substantially to the south of the section we explore in bm_c2a5c.
However, there’s not really a location there that fits. Ultimately, I began wondering if Crossfire might be a remote facility like the one visible from Cliffside.

Could these even actually be the same facility?

Well, I doubt it, since there is no river visible from Crossfire and no real place for the Gasworks-style buildings in Cliffside. But I think we’re heading in the right direction. I remember a long time ago speculating that these structures have something to do with servicing aircraft to maintain a security perimeter around the BMRF and possibly hosting research equipment that is too dangerous or sensitive to be placed near the rest of the facility- this does seem to fit Crossfire (with its big gun turrets, helipad, radio tower, personnel areas and machine shops in the built-up section, and giant situation map in the bunker) extremely well. If that’s the case there is probably more than one of these outposts, forming a perimeter that encircles the entire base (could these even be the “topside checkpoints” mentioned in the PA announcements?).

Now, the southern end of the facility looks pretty open and I don’t think would have anything like this, and we already see a lot of development on the eastern half so I am reluctant to put Crossfire there, but if we flip the map 180 degrees from the way it’s presented at the top of the post so that the big empty vista is to the north, the cinderblock buildings are to the east, and the bunker is to the west (which, coincidentally, preserves the canonical sun angles) I think we can find a good place for it off to the facility’s northeast.

In this configuration, that big warehousey building we see far up the hill might be the northernmost part of the main facility, from which the road leading to this checkpoint comes.

[Admiral_Sakai]

So, we’ve only really got one more map to place, and… well, it’s going to be interesting.

The problem is not that I don’t know where to put bm_c2a5b, but that since it’s connected to the rest of the base via drainage pipes (which I typically think of as prime locations for warps) and doesn’t have any clearly identifiable features visible from the skybox, it could really go anywhere.

The map got altered a fair bit from .RK’s day, but the overall structure and orientation are still the same (and I, foolishly, took my screenshot of the more recent map flipped 180 degrees).

Now, even though in gameplay it’s located between Cliffside and the dam, I think there is a fairly strong argument to be made for this section of the facility actually being somewhere in the southwest. We’ve got the same sort of concrete tunnels we ran into in Stack, Questionable Ethics, and Inbound…

we’ve got metal ‘fortress’-style walls (even though these are red and the previous ones were bluish gray)…

That said, there are a few elements of this place that seem to indicate a location in the northwest, namely a hazmat storage area similar to the one in Undertow…

and a dm_bounce-like abandoned area with old-timey wooden beams

Therefore, I am ultimately deciding where to place this section of the facility based on what it could connect to- and my big constraint there is that while the road to the west seems to go to some sort of complex of unknown size, to the south it actually terminates in an extremely sparsely-developed area of the complex:

Is there more facility behind the canal and open plain? Maybe. There’s some kind of composting machine there, after all. Ultimately, I suppose it’s a question of how I want to set the roads up.

On the south side, the way I have imagined the roads being set up is something like this:

(Perhaps the big bunker complex is an east-end parking garage?)

Now, it’s obvious that somewhere around those bunkers is a main facility entrance, but that doesn’t mean other, less developed areas can’t still exist along the southern border. In particular, I am thinking that since we have that giant tube leaking radioactive gunk on the east end of the map, this whole structure is actually closer to Blast Pit:

…
And just like that, the layout of the BMRF is… complete! Which means I should probably update the Big Image and the Dropbox link at some point, too…

[Admiral_Sakai]

All right! Finally got around to uploading the new versions to the main post!

I might work on this a bit more as the pre-disaster maps expand- connecting roads, tram tracks, and so forth- but I think for the foreseeable future this schematic of the BMRF is complete!