Making A Complete 3D Map of Black Mesa (GoldSrc)

Assembled from Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue-Shift, and Decay

Decay Solo Mission & Decay PC port used for footage.

[Gzalo]

Loved your video!
Wish I could have done something as exhaustive as yours back then, it's been almost 10 years since I wrote the first lines of what would become HalfMapper. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, there are still some bugs and things I never got around to implementing, and I've moved to other projects and haven't had much time to even maintain it 😔
Not sure why, but I really enjoy seeing game maps being rendered all at once (to get a sense of the sheer scale of it, I guess) and isometric maps so that's how HalfMapper was born :P I wish other games also had similar viewers (e.g, Bioshock Inifite, GTA, and even some early 3d graphic adventures)

[exportedrice]

"This place is a whole lot bigger than I thought" - Security Guard

[zck]

With S&Box's unlimited map size, I could see this being an RP map.

[Jessetor]

open world black mesa would be crazy in sven coop!

[TheBadlandsSandvich]

Next up: "Making A Complete 3D Map of Aperture Science"

[johnclark]

Imagine if you put three people in this map and they each had to race each other to finish either Half-Life, Opposing Force, or Blue Shift first

[Awesomeness-izdh]

I'd love to see an official map of every area of Black Mesa seen in every game made by Valve that edits them slightly to make them all line up and fit together.

[asuperrandomguy]

Man someone need to turn this into a "open facility" game where you play as a science 1 day before HL1

this almost makes me want to learn how to program half life maps

[DyoKasparov]

first half of the quest has been completed, now we need someone to make this into a game we could explore :)

[lymphoid]

I'd like to clarify that the sense of the word "map" I am using is in the classic sense of a guide map, not as .bsp map (level). This could never be run in half-life like this. HalfMapper is merely for viewing and touring the levels.

When I joke about an open world game, my emphasis is on how the game world is truly all connected into one world. If someone could create an engine and some game objectives that would have this make any sense, it wouldn't require all the level to load at once. That would be pointless. Even Minecraft loads in "chucks" necessary for the player to see.

This is what Goldsrc and Source currently do. They load the map that is needed by the player at the moment, and then carry all player data (health, stats, etc) over to the next map when passing through a transition. The engines don't do this for multiplayer though. That's where the modifications would need to be implemented.

[jakeohligerintheflesh]

Honestly, someone should take this layout and make art of how these parts of the Black Mesa Research Facility look from a bird's view from the outside, It looks like the facility is mainly located on a mountain, so it's be cool to see how that would look!

[polishworm]

I wish the developers hadn't done so much conflicting with each other space. If someone was about to make a giant Black Mesa map, he would also need to lengthen/shorten and change directions of some corridors.

[sonic_exe]

Man this sure needed a lot of thinking.

[AustinDallasPictures]

Amazing video and demonstration. I'm glad I'm not the only half life fan who wants the entire mesa to be 1 map

[MasterOfPeeing]

This is my dream. All the expansions connected. Ever since about 2 years ago, I always was interested in this idea. One Idea I thought would be cool, would be a 5 Player Half life game where you play as each character in their respective and seperate Areas. Of course, I know a problem with that is the speed, and the limitations of the Goldsource engine.

[PouLS]

It's so frustrating that you were so close to perfection, but a Blue Shift map had to be rotated for some reason and ruin everything... anyway, thank you for this amazing work!

[xboop]

1:58 Ha! I new there was something wrong with that part of the game when i played it. Gordon does a 180 in the pipe in the cliff and comes out onto an area where the cliff was.

[finodiez]

Useful info. I come from the Sven Coop dev discord. In Sven Coop, the devs merged the HL maps using official valve source assets (the original goldsrc assets were lost) and it mostly lines up everything just fine except a few details... BUT the big problem is just as this video says The Dam. People have come to the conclusion that between the dam and the next map there is a missing map. And there is.
The map in question is the one you could see in a screenshot used ingame during the WON era before steam existed, it was used for adjusting the brightness of the game or the gama.
The missing map was about a big gargantua fight with grunts in a huge open airfield with helipads. It was probably cut from the game because of engine limitations and the fact that the garg fight theme would be repeated too much in the game.
I have not found the map anywhere, but someone had made a recreation of it..although I can't find it either anymore.

[ola_ola._.]

just imagine a roleplay of a functional black mesa, like going to another sector in a train system, it would be so frickin cool

[XanderNiles]

Wow! That's a lot of work and effort put into it. It looks fantastic! Also, I can picture an open world Black Mesa map. I don't think it's possible to be made in GoldSrc engine and neither could be in Source engine but a man can dream.