This single level mod was created beside my daily office work (2d & print) and is my first experience with Source SDK and game modding. It started with idea to build a little section of City 17 and familiarize oneself with tools. But I wanted the level to be little more open and realistic. It has no tied relation to Half-Life 2 plot, just a random urban area section. First I planned it as a dummy/show map but environment is nothing without game-play. I had no idea that this more spacious map turns out to be disaster on the very limits of the Source engine. But in retrospect, it was the way to learn the most. In the sense, it is failure from the ground up/planning and there are still some issues but the map is playable. It was an interesting eight months, learned a lot and even composed a fair amount notes. There are still many things to study, I deliberately voided creating custom props and textures (even though in many cases, it would have helped). I want to give thanks all the amazing Source on-line communities from where I found helpful knowledge and material.
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All the comments and critique welcome.
NOTE: The map is in very limits (brushes 87.6%; brushsides 83.6%; texinfos 89.6%; waterindices 99.7% and entdata 187.9%). I don't know, if there are any performance issues, on the machine I tested there seemed to be no difference whether the map is run optimized or unoptimized. Only the game engine had something to say. Spite all the efforts there are still locations on the level where player can see distant flickering and disappearing faces ('Too many vertex format changes in frame' error). I have not yet managed to track down the real reason behind this, nothing to do with vertex or geometry, rather textures (the map uses fair amount but I have seen levels with more(count/size)). Compiling without cubemaps also removes the problem. Any help is greatly appreciated. It doesn't feel very good to release such a broken product. There are other minor issues: optimization, unpredictable HDR lighting but there may be many things am not even aware - there has been no play-testing.
