Just for comparison, here’s some shots of the old transition room (unfinished):
Some of the things I’m considering doing are getting rid of the red doors and making both exits from the transition room swing doors, making that room not a proper lobby but either an office or breakroom with two doors (like the breakroom and one-light room in B map), or just removing the second set of doors entirely and having the swing door in the lobby open directly into the other office floor.
Ok, so, going back to clean up A map, and I’m considering ways to add the ventilation area back in:
I was considering just putting it behind the similarly-colored door in the maintenance hallway, but that is not only very far away from the canonical location of the fan room but would also cause most of it to collide with the bathrooms.
Now, canonically, the fan room is located “about here”:
Until now, I’ve taken placements of rooms with respect to ventilation ducts as “canon”, and tried not to break ductwork or move rooms that are connected to it even if the player won’t be crawling through those ducts any more. However, in a lot of areas of Black Mesa, ducts are connected to each other incredibly weirdly, sometimes using trigger_teleports [!] to get the player where they need to go. So I actually feel pretty good about cutting that ventilation duct someplace that’s not very noticeable and moving the fan room up to the level of the back offices.
As for getting to the slightly relocated fan room (which I would also prefer to move a bit closer to the entry corridor, economic use of space and all that…
I could just cut another door in this wall, about where the posterboard is right now, and run another maintenance hall over to the room.
Instead, I’m proposing a fairly drastic restructuring of the back sections of Office Complex. I always thought that it was kind of a shame having this whole second half-level to the area with only two medium-sized offices in it, and with the map currently sitting at only 136% entdata it has a lot of room to expand.
If we name a few things in the existing map as follows:
Then I might want to “pivot” A and B (making A a corner office, something I always wanted to do) and create something like this:
Thoughts?
All right. After consultation with a few other people (thanks, MisterDigitalGuy!) I’ve tentatively decided to keep the cinderblock corridor as the main access from the lobby to the cafeteria, probably with the brighter lighting scheme. That clears up a major sticking point, and allows us to finally build up our diagram of expanded C-map somewhat:
However, there are a few smallish things I would like to clear up.
The big problem is this window:
That said, there is a possibility- the stairwell landing’s floor is actually barely higher than the proposed office level’s ceiling (which would be at the same height as the lobby and windows). Therefore, if we bring a section of the new office level as far to the left as we can go without actually hitting the next-lower step…
Once I’ve gotten feedback on this area, we will be free to move on to the next section of the map- the less challenging but more confusing “north-east” quadrant, containing the fan room, the “restricted access” double doors, and one of the corridors that comes off of the cafeteria.
Progress on the new back area of A map is coming along steadily, more steadily than the lighting tweaks in fact!
I’m still not 100% sure what to put at the end of that corridor… I was going to go with vending machines or file cabinets, but all the other hallway segments in this place have something special at the end of them, usually a maintenance area or logistical thing that functions as another entrance to the complex.
Nice job!
It’s gonna look like a real RPG
As for that… it’s pretty early on in the process, but if you do want to get involved in the development of Induction-style RP content for this mod, you could always get a head start on developing the objectives, interactions, and so on that you’d like to see implemented.
Hello!
Just wanted to say that you, @Admiral Sakai, and @ArcHammer, are doing the great job with your work on the Pre-disaster Black Mesa maps. I’ve fallen in love with Black Mesa since 2014 (the year I’ve learned about the original mod release), and I was always asking myself, how could the entire facility look like before the disaster.
I enjoy your maps a lot guys, they are amazing 
i have some first peeks of the OAR maps im currently working on (Sorry that it took so long). These are not canon but merely an extension like the OAR uncut version. Although im still hoping for a vmf release of OAR uncut but in the mean time i can do some mapping experience plus extending the OAR chapter. This will be connected right after the first OAR map. Let me know what you think im sure there are alot of improvements to be made that i do not see yet, so please let me know.
[attach=4701,none,1920][/attach][attach=4697,none,1920][/attach][attach=4698,none,1920][/attach][attach=4699,none,1920][/attach][attach=4700,none,1920][/attach][attach=4696,none,1920][/attach][attach=4694,none,1920][/attach]
I still have alot of problems with props not showing up. I know about the static, dynamic and physics properties and how to use them. does this have anything to do with me using HL instead of BMS models perhaps? Also most of the info_decals aren’t showing up as well.
Are you getting any compile errors? What does your entity budget look like?
well thats another strange thing. im only getting 5.8% entdata
It’s time to take a look at C map’s northeast quadrant. This one is kind of the inverse of the southeast- there, I knew exactly what I wanted to build and had a horrible time getting it to fit with respect to the level geometry, but here I know pretty well how the geometry of the new area will work out and not at all what I actually want to build.
This sector has three “entrances”, and not a whole lot to connect it to other areas (there are canonical parts of the map that stick up to separate it from the northwest and southeast expansion areas):
This door (in the maintenance hallway).There’s also the fan room in there- this one is actually substantially easier to deal with than the one in A map because it is actually located nearby a few other doors, so I don’t have to build out a whole 'nother corridor to connect to it.
Top-down, the quadrant looks something like this:
As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of room to maneuver- nonetheless, I did come up with a fairly decent way to set up this sector as a tram station in my first attempt at C map.
Door 1 connected to FR Door B via a little maintenance area- I am actually very happy with that area, and would probably include it with only a few modifications:
I then had the corridor in Door 3 turn northwards, into, well, kind of a shitty tram platform actually, but the point was geometrically it worked- now that I was well north of the fan platform, I could build a massive area pretty much with impunity, including against one of the south walls a door to a maintenance room that connected very neatly to FR Door A.
Door 2 is locked, boarded up, and plastered with safety stickers, and for good reason- it actually opens directly into the big pipe coming out of the fan room! In the first version of the map I just left it sealed off like that, but now that I am not considering the ductwork to be canonical I could actually move the fan room to the east enough to make that passage viable (and give myself a bit more room to extend the Door 3 corridor!). Presumably, that door would also go to the tram platform (it’s on a different height, but I could easily visualize a ramp).
The only real problem is that I keep saying tram platform this and tram platform that, but I don’t think this is actually the proper place to put a tram platform! It’s just not a very central location- there’s only one guaranteed entrance, in a little side corridor with a non-handicapped-accessible stairway connecting it to the dingy cafeteria lounge, and the other door has those “no access” signs all over it and opens into that maintenancy cinderblock hallway that I am still trying to avoid. Furthermore, there’s a nice spot for a tram station in the southeast quadrant, right next to an elevator and a freight handling bay and a whole bunch of other logistics-related stuff.
But what else would even go up here? More offices? I think it would be odd just having a little square area with a couple of cubicles sitting off not really connected to any other administrative area, behind a door that promises hazardous machinery. Some kind of materials handling bay? what would freight even be doing over there, if the tram station and freezer rooms are both off to the southwest?
Curious, curious problem…
@Admiral Sakai, love the idea of connecting the shaft and the Door 1 - makes a lot of sense.
Door 2 seems to be a curious problem: the shaft, as far as I remember, isn’t completely at the same level, so I thought maybe there could be some sort of stairs going up?
Now, being inspired by your idea of the tram station, I’ve imagined this plan:
Cafeteria connects to a Tram Station, using the Door 3 (both sides). Cafeteria is less secure than other areas (or, at least, it seems so), so why not? In this case, we could also easily connect the second door in the ventilation shaft to the train tunnel…
That sounds good i think. Maybe its even possible to place a second tramstation connected to this one somewhere else in OC. That would also keep the tramride interresting. Like some sort of substation.
Ok, regarding the corridor from cafeteria to the beginning of the C map (see below):
That problem, with the out-of-sync corridor to the cafeteria, it led me to thinking that we might have a different way to connect cafeteria with the beginning of the C map (see a corridor in orange):
Now, you might ask how could we connect them to the area with the elevator to the right… There is a door and an adjacent window, the door seems to be an entrance to an office, but it’s closed. What if it was actually an entrance to that corridor? This might look like in the A map, where there is a small door, but a large corridor hiding behind it. The only problem is, there’s no “Exit” sign, but, well, this was a disaster, right? 
Regarding the office space and connection to the elevator, I’ve pretty much decided by now that there’s really no reason not to have at least some kind of connection between the lobby and the office area beyond- whether that’s just an office with two doors, or some kind of lounge area, or even just a door in a patch of wall I am not sure yet, but I’ll be able to decide what looks best when I actually start designing the internal configuration of that section.
As for the upper area… putting the tram station at both ends of the hallway had not occurred to me, but I’m finding myself more and more drawn to it- there’s not a lot to go in that northwestern area that the other fork leads into, and expanding the tram station laterally would give it more room to grow. I might even want to include a security office and a few other things in that center bit.
Let’s call that Plan A for now.
(I was seriously considering making this platform the actual one for Office Complex, but according to the signs this is actually still part of the Area 9 Hub:
Ah well…)
Now, there is also a fairly compelling argument for putting the tram station in the southwest. There’s a forked corridor there very similar to the one up top, but this area also connects to the rear side of the giant refrigerator- important if we want to consider how those giant cow carcasses are loaded into the complex. It would also be directly in front of a lobby with an elevator, as opposed to the northeast station that has a stairway, the cafeteria lounge, and the cafeteria itself before it can get to the same place. Let’s call that Plan B.
If we do put the tram station in the B location, that opens up the question of what to do with the northeast again. Back when I was starting this project, I was thinking about finding some way to connect this section of Inbound, since it’s clearly an administrative area and in very roughly the right place on .RK’s facility map:
Love the idea of connecting Office Complex with the Area 9 Hub +1 for it.
Speaking of this…
Could you be so kind to give a visual map? Can’t grasp the directions (what is northwestern, what’s not)…
Ask and ye shall receive:
You can see the north-side fork corridor pretty clearly, up above the cafeteria and the brown carpet that makes up the lounge; the southern fork corridor is kind of hidden under the upper Admin 3 level, but you can kind of see it sandwiched between the Admin 3 lobby and that little maintenance room way to the south.
Also, having looked in way too much detail at .RK’s map, it would appear that the area with all the offices in Inbound is in fact closer to the south of the map than the north (but still pretty far away). In fact, it looks like Office Complex is in fact directly under Area 3 Security (which makes really precious little sense). Assuming that is not the case, then the most likely nearby location is near the Level 3 dorms, in the square area formed by the two-line track with the "generator control’ doors and that one long cinderblock maintenance area. That said, I always thought that the lower rail line in Area 9 was what eventually connected to the tram station we are building, so A, B, and C maps are likely well below the track we pass through on Inbound.
Thanks a lot, things become way clearer!
Well, just explored again the Inbound, and noticed that the administrative section colors are also seen in the Area 3 Dormitories tram station…
Obviously, freezer HAS to be connected to something… But I think it shall be connected (via an elevator I guess) with the road, not the tram line.
Speaking of the roads… I didn’t try to connect all of the maps together, but could the road tunnel seen in the C map be somehow connected to the road tunnel seen in the A map (the very beginning of the Office Complex)?
I certainly always thought of them as the same road, spiralling down through the administration complex with loading bays every other floor.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
