Brought to you by the Black Mesa Transit Authorities

April 02 2016 Edit : New version of the map - I added few missing stations back to its glory, and upped resolution of the image for better view. More polishing works to be done.

Disclaimer before I start this topic : English is not my mother language, so if you see any inadvertent errors or omissions, feel free to correct me.

For the past seven days I have been working on a transit map for the Black Mesa Research Facility for use on my custom Black Mesa map. Right now, it still need some polishing works, mostly on textings.

I know this has been attempted a few times before me. But I wanted to make one myself because I was planning to use it on my custom map, and it’s easier than getting a permission. Plus, none of them seemed “finished” either.

I used .RK’s map for reference. I really was against the idea of using modded maps, since I wanted this to be more vanila (however if I wanted real pure vanila I would need to use Half-Life. But did not for reasons I will explain later), I did not want to go through all the levels and take screenshots myself. So, many diamonds to him!

I did not base the map on the transit map seen in Blue Shift - it has too many problems and decided to do it from scratch. I also added a new line - Violet Line (which did not exist in Blue Shift). I also had given each lines a number in addition to the colors.

On the left side of the map, all the stations in Line 1, 2 and 3 are listed. On the right side, stations in Line 4 and 5, and some minor trivia (legends).

Please keep in mind that the map is 2-D projection and therefore does not account for height difference between stations. For example, obviously, High Security Storage Facility is located higher than Administration Offices, as seen in Half-Life. This (of course) is not shown in the map.

This is still WIP, which mean it is bound to change (not a final product).

Even though Black Mesa was used to make the map, I decided to step further and integrate Opposing Force and Blue Shift into the map as well. This means you can draw “paths” where Gordon, Adrian and Barney has walked through during the course of their game on the map. Here are them (smaller size for better view). Sorry for the cheesy Microsoft Paint-Like drawings.

(Note: This path maps were created before I made changes to the transit map, so they may be different from the map shown above. It shouldn’t affect too much though.)

Please do note that I did not use Decay for reference a lot and that is why you see all these big jumps of location. The game was on very low priority.

Some things I wanna note:

  • Signs saying “Sector B Coolant Reserve” can be seen few times in-game but Gordon never visit the reserve. In the map, the reserve is indeed in close proximity with the Anomalous Materials, but you can see Gordon simply skipping the reserve past.

  • Freight Yard is at the edge of the facility, as this portion of the facility is directly connected to the New Mexico Rail Network.

  • Air Control is at the edge of the facility, obviously.

  • Lots and lots of dormitories scattered around the facility.

  • In all Half-Life games, it’s the train that gets transferred to another line, with people inside. I changed this deliberately however, and made trains can’t access other lines (exception at the Junction point). Now it’s people who has to exit the train, go over to approriate platform and ride the new train.

  • Hydro Electric and Ordinance Storage Facility are in close proximity with each other, as can be seen in Opposing Force.

  • Drainage Canal is located in center of the facility, assumed from the signs saying “NORTH ACCESS” and “SOUTH ACCESS” and I assumed that the canal is located the same distance from the two access tunnels - which is center.

  • Medical Bay and Materials Transport are all located in the center of the facility as well.

  • Uplink Center is in close proximity with Freight Yard (as numerous freight cargos can be seen in Uplink).

  • One of the thing I wanted to keep in mind is to have the transit map easy to see and understand for those who are colorblinded. I’m not colorblind myself so this was hard to have. While I did try several options, I decided to keep it simple. My art skill isn’t sufficient enough to draw nice curves! The station IDs should provide a nice alternative for now.

However, nothing can be perfect. Half-Life, since it has never been worked on with realistic design in mind, lots of conflict occur that I was unable to adress in this map. Some of them are:

  • According to the map, in Inbound chapter, Gordon has transferred his train once on Medium Security station then re-routed back on H.E. Labs station. This does not occur in-game. Also, in the same chapter riding trams, Gordon should have passed Silo D. This also does not happen in-game.

  • According to the map, in Inbound chapter, Gordon should have passed South Wing of Level 3. This does not happen in-game again. Also, Couldn’t he have just used this station instead of North Wing?
    (It’s possible that the south wing station was not accessible at the time of Half-Life) (These two are more of my problems than Half-Life, but I really did not have many rooms to put the stations)

  • Did soldiers seriously drag Gordon all the way over to the proccessing plant from the rocket launch center?
    (Most likely they used trucks of sort to transport him)

  • Even though the map lists Hydro Electric, there is no feasible location for it to exist. The dam face south direction. But southern Black Mesa is occupied by the Air Control.

  • There is no feasible location for the Cliffside Battle area in Surface Tension.

  • Some very unnecessaily long travel in Decay, especially from Central Transit Hub to Code Green
    (could be explained by the fact that they used transit system to get there)

… And that’s it.

UDhDDH7

Very Impressive !

I tried making one of these a few years back, and it quickly became an inaccurate mess. Even so, it ended up in the Hazard Course addon, since my plans to figure out what actually went where and make an updated version never panned out.

But you, you managed to get it down pat. Aside from a few spelling errors due to English being a second language (Airport Runaway should read Airport Runway, for instance) I can’t find a single thing wrong with it. Good job, sir!

I’m very impressed with your depth and specificity throughout it. It shows that you’ve put quite a bit of effort into making it as accurate and detailed as you can.

I can already tell this will be extremely helpful in the creation of the Pre-Disaster maps and/or mod in the future.
Can’t wait to see your mod by the way!

Thanks for all the compliments, everyone. I updated OP with newer version of the map. I added a few more stations on the red line, upped the image resolution to staggering 4096x2048 (it’s in much smaller size on forum for better view). I also re-done some of the texts (e.g. “Brought to you by~” and “Black Mesa Research Facility”) in much higher resolution. Feel free to keep suggest/report mistakes. I’ll try fix it as long as it’s not about me having to completely do the entire thing from scratch. Don’t wanna take that risk just yet.

I think I saw your map when I googled “black mesa transit system” a while back. I didn’t look it because I did not want to risk your map getting imprinted on my brain and use someone else’s idea the map unconsciously.

Also, yeah, I fixed the “runaway” typo. Thanks for pointing that out!

I’m sure I could have done it better, but I wouldn’t be able to make it any better from here without tearing apart everything (i.e. completely re-do the transit lines).

If you guys want, I can let you use my map in your pre-disaster mod too. I’m keep polishing/updating the map right now. But just want to warn you that I doubt if it will work out nicely, Black Mesa architecture is not really designed for this. Even my map has flaws here and there. There’s just no escaping!

And it’s more of just map packs than mod. It’s got few custom sounds and textures (including this map!) but not more.

Hmm… Your path drawing implies that Gordon transfers from Red to Green, then back to Red again? Maybe I’m not interpreting this correctly.

If we go by the colors in the tram tunnels, he does that and more before finally getting to Sector C.

I quite like this interpretation of the rail system, but I’ve long-since given up on producing anything of the kind that actually makes sense topologically. I think I’ll just use a fade-to-black for the tram rides in BMPD proper.

Like Admiral Sakai said, he does change his tram lines a few times during the game.

The South Wing station is located much closer to the Anomalous Materials, but I set my own “head canon” that the south wing station was “having problems” which forced Gordon to go through the entire dormitory complex (As seen in Decay, Gordon’s personal room is located closer to the south wing), making him late to work - which get worse since in North wing station you have to go around the facility and change lines multiple times too.

Please also understand that I went to much more conventional mean of “transfer” when I drew the map. In Half-Life and all of its series, its the tram that gets transferred to another line with passangers still in them. But I decided to not go with this idea. It didnt seem like clever idea. In the game if they made us change lines by ourselves it will get annoying very quickly. So when I drew this map I freed myself from this and made so that each transfer stations have multiple platforms, each corrosponding to different line. This would not work in game, but work work much better from real life perspective.

And finally, even this map is not complete, no map will be. I often had to sacrifice one thing to make another thing work, as the way Black Mesa is designed is not “map-friendly”.

It really is impossible to make one that make sence unless you totally reconfigure the entire facility. When I used RK’s map for reference I had really bad time on Sueface Tension levels because they get totally stacked on each other (youll know what I mean when you see the map). Fixing this would require “go out of canon” and set the connection between levels arbitrary. But I didnt want to go like that and just used what I was given with.

That’s a great map Kevin! Great work!
this reminds of how I amazed I am to this day how every half-life game leaves the gamer wanting the BMRF and City 17 to be real and fully functional places! I think Valve just did an astounishing job making an extremely long tube seem like a huge facility or even a city (and so did the BM devs by recreating and expanding it). I mean there’s even a complete street map of city 17 made by a fan, I think (though looking at it, there’s some issues concerning the scale of the streets). Half-Life has always been so memorable not only because of the scripted scenes and the amazing gameplay, but also because of the believable places built around the action. It always left me wanting the tram to stop at another station so badly…which is why the add-ons were so awesome, too.

Anyway, I really love this map. And I am damn curious to see where this and the Pre-Disaster Project will be heading to. Kudos!

EDIT: Comparing your map to subway maps from around the world it comes to attention that despite being topogrammatical maps most of them give geographical references like simplified displays of rivers and shorelines. We don’t know much about the exact geographical position of the BMRF, but we DO know that there is at least one river that can be seen at at least to sites (the dam and the cliffside level). Now, it’s open for debate if they are the same river (I would assume so), but it could give your map nice geographical refrence that helps to understand the scale of the map. Just a suggestion, but it might be worth playing around with it and see how it turns out.

Thanks. I saw the map of City 17 the other day and it also blew my mind! Shame my map isn’t as perfect as that map is.

The geographical references you mentioned were in the original iteration of the map but I had it removed on the final release version for various reasons. Remember that I used RK’s map for reference building this map.

(Image is courtesy of .RK)

This is the image of the map of Surface Tension - on the top left corner you can see the entire chapter pieced together. But there’s problem. It all overlaps in one piece - yuck! That won’t happen in real life! You can see as the dam river goes down… it intersect with the Topside Motorpool (seen in Surface Tension Uncut). The dam face south, indeed in my map Topside Motorpool station is located south of Hydro Electric - but the problem arise because if I were to “draw” the river… well it would intersect with the tram lines.

As seen in Opposing Force, Freight Yard/Ordinance Storage Complex also are located in proximity with Hydro Electric, which further add conflict near this area since I ran out space to add them very quickly.

The cliffside, my god. I have no idea what happened to it. At first glace, you don’t even see where the cliff is. Only after a few careful look you find cliff to be located at the exact center of the entire Surface Tension chapter - what the hell??

Like I said, dam face south, so does cliff would (Black Mesa is located in Northern Hemisphere after all!). But then… How does this work exactly? If I were to follow the map it would have to be placed somewhere between Hydro Electric and Topside Motorpool. But that wouldn’t make sense as southern portion of this part is Air Control (another Uncut place, which also appear in Decay).

So I decided to just remove the river from the map. I still am very unsatisfied with the whole mess with Hydro Electric, but there’s only so much I can do about it. I might be able to fix it if I were to ignore all the canon but that’s not what I want. Canon comes first, then logic.

Hmm. I wonder where in Black Mesa is the area that monitors and controls the tram system itself?

I’ve been thinking of new stations to add for some time. Originally I used to think the Transit Authorities to be located somewhere inside Central Command Center, but I actually think they may deserve their own station considering their significance within the company. I don’t have any more space to add more stations, but I can replace the existing ones, and I have a good candidate location for it too.

Now I do have to mention that some stations listed on my map are temporal - these temporal, “fake” stations are there only to fill in the gaps for now, and they will be replaced by other ideas.

I also have been planning about adding Sector G Main Access station (was seen in Blue Shift - have no idea why it got dropped in my map. Should be placed near Medium Security / High Energy Particles Lab) and Robotics division (Black Mesa seem to vastly utilize robots in lots and lots of places - which made me think that they probably have separate facility for manufacturing / maintain them).

Just in general, more engineering divisions that developed things like the robots and possibly the HEV suits themselves would be a good fit, yes.

One small gripe is that the dots representing a left-handed station are almost invisible- the first time I saw them, I thought they were a glitch in the image and not part of the map itself.

Also, why is some of the text doubled in Chinese? One would expect Spanish to be a better fit given the location.

About the dots, I’ll make sure I do something about it.

The chinese characters weren’t there from the beginning. One friend suggested me to include some foreign characters. I always envisioned Black Mesa as an international company, with scientists and security guards from all over the world(this obviously did not happen in-game). So I thought some foreign texts would add to detail a lot.

I then simply had looked up and opted for language that were most prominently used in the year 2000-ish (I have a feeling that I have to mention that I’m not chinese myself, I can barely understand them). Which was chinese, followed by english, and then spanish. I think you are right actually, since spanish workers would be much more prominent in place like Black Mesa. I mean, this IS New Mexico. I actually think there were some signs that are in spanish too but I can’t confirm (I’m not spanish either, if you hadn’t figured it out by now).

Yeah in the US (especially near the Mexican border), you’d usually expect Latin American Spanish as an alternate language for things like signs.

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.