my compo idea making (tl dr included) Created 5 years ago2019-06-12 19:16:26 UTC by hfc

how about a building with fancy architecture, and a surrounding fancy garden.

hl maps are made of always indoors or connected halways. (much like a carved playground out of a big block of map)

there are not much big building within a yard that has a useful playground in it. because of engine capabilites

we may challenge ourselves with this compo.

here is sample map ideas:
-a giant tree house.
-a cheateu or castle.
-a command base on desert
-surface units of black mesa.
-a campsite on top of a hill.

but we shouldnt sacrifice gameplay or story it also should have a gameplay function.

for example you can enter and find a way out from frankensteins castle. you may make your indoor area smaller than outdoor but it should be used in main gameplay

and you may add a bit hills or cliffs or a fence around because of not breaking the realism ilusion

you may surround your open area only with a skybox, but its not much suitable to this compo because you can make any hallway map to an open space map with that. so your map should not be like a hallway map surrounded with a skybox. you may use skybox anyway.

you are free to choose garden/building ratio. and you are also free to not place your building in the middle. and also you are free to add any amount of subsurface playground areas as well.

for example you may put your 3 wall of your building looking to your garden, and your 4th wall may have a window with a skybox texture. so you can increase your un interrupted garden area. or you may add an underground wine cellar to your castle. or you may add an abondoned mine on your campsite.

tl;dr key is getting rid hallways and make map more open.

winning criterias might be, fancyness or wideness and quality of wide space. or just arcitecture or even gameplay. or lowness of surrounding cliff. because lower cliff makes maps more open spaced. but you also consider realism illusion otherwise your wide area designs quality gets lower so your compo entrys place will not gonna get higher.

goldsource is preffered because you can make these kind of map in source already. bu if you use source you may not add any hallway like element to your map.

PS:i got bored with writing and quitted from my idea when writing this article.But im gonna make some map some time without hallways.

It's an interesting concept, but a little open ended for a competition. I would suggest reeling it in a little for a competition pitch, but even then I would prefer a game play challenge over an environmental one.

how about a bigger picture? a huge xen tree grows in black mesa and protrudes through the surface of the desert and grows all the way into the sky and at the very top is the xen command base, like some kind of biomechanical castle

@urbanebula hmm i thought open ended this kind of compo would be cool. if this was too open ended then sadly this compo may be imposible to achieve. im gonna narrow and clean the idea later.

@bruce its would be cool if you could make it to look like jack and the beanstalk and this is very hard to achieve but i dont know how the results will be. after all i think in this compo, achitectural and artistic quality would be more important than idea to achieve good results.

Why not try to make an structural and operationally correct black mesa laboratory section? With thought on foundation, structural support, installations, ventilation, drainage, climate/atmosphere equipment, special structural enhancements for special equipment, emergency devices/passes/etc, placement of things... Would be nice to see.
Make it in space even.

Make it named the "TWHL Safety Inspection" compo.

-Edit

Would be nice to see Sector C test labs from an eyes of an safety inspector

Stojke said:Why not try to make an structural and operationally correct black mesa laboratory section? With thought on foundation, structural support, installations, ventilation, drainage, climate/atmosphere equipment, special structural enhancements for special equipment, emergency devices/passes/etc, placement of things... Would be nice to see.
Make it in space even.

Make it named the "TWHL Safety Inspection" compo.

-Edit

Would be nice to see Sector C test labs from an eyes of an safety inspector

Or even the complete opposite: make a work environment that is so obviously dangerous and unsafe it's a complete miracle that it still works.

@stojke operationally correct architecture interesting idea. hmm🤔 but i think there should not be only safety things. i think we may include food courts kitchen, would be nice to see black mesa facility from an eyes of labor. i think its boring only with scis. modellers could make labor models. then every entry would download and include labors in their maps. and compo would be named "black mesa a living facility" compo may include making all work areas. or every entry may include only one area. some people would make maintanence guys, others make kitchens and food court, etc. i always wanted to see what would happen to frozen foods in office complex' freezer, if resonance cascane never happened. where these food boxes came and where them going?

@Dr. orange Its already obvious "we tried to warn them." but resonance cascade has happened

The 80s - 90s time period of black mesa , from what ive always figured out was the time in which it all occurred in, is in my eyes the best possible time for such a huge facility to exist, I mean, even if you think about it the automated system that reports of everything, how big was the infrastructure and the installations for that? Not to mention the need for custom hardware, programming, testing... Everything had to be huge to perform complex precise tasks hence I am the most interested into the operational correctness of it all. Maybe a mass spectrometer of today would fit into a smaller cabinet

Imagine that complex system that had to be put into operation inside an already aging infrastructure, they had to redesign a whole lot, dont you think? Portal 2 shows this really well when you go from the 50s to the latest technology in use. From what I understand thats the same as what black mesa went trough. There are some things from that age that area already better than today, like generating and transporting clean electricity, maybe not as efficient at storing as today, but imagine what changed that had to be done to bring the infrastructure to the level required for such integration. Also a number of small firms or agencies included in all of that, who knew that a company making motor coils would be secretly contracted for uses at black mesa

When you put all of those things into account it makes all the sense about the ingame situation of the facility and the dissatisfaction of the personnel there. Ahh, if only half life was much more deeply detailed in both story and gameplay , i can see from the little details what they had in mind when they were making it back then

cool but imposible to implement.

black mesa have lots of 60s stuff exists in year 2000. Onlt this much is possible in 1998

Im also wondering what would valve do if they have much powerful engine and PC technology. I see they are added cool details but not deep enough because of 98's tech limits.

I hope one day when half-life movie was out it will include all details that producers imagined but couldnt implemented.