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Urban

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A deathmatch-styled map based on Valve's early blockouts for City 17, frequently referred to as "urb" in the older files of the Half-Life 2 beta.

Much of these streets hearken back to the oldest concepts for 17, which portray decrepit and crumbling infrastructure, suppressed by a constant stream of acid rain and toxic air.

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As with a lot of the earliest city maps (most of which are absent from the WC Mappack and likely lost forever), there's a remnant of GoldSrc charm still present, owed to the game's fresh evolution from the 90's engine at the time. This was a period where much of the "dark and oppressive" auras reached their peak in the art and storytelling, before gradually burning off on the tail end of 2001 to give way for the dystopian European design scheme.
Adding onto that, I wanted to give my own spin on the SIGGRAPH (Free TVs tech demo) design, which is likely our best vision into how the developers were intending for the city to feel in its earliest stages of production, as well as combining fragments of a few others, like "streetfire", "sniper", and "ruins". Though I can't be certain that this is the most accurate portrayal of how things looked, I wanted to shy away from the "1999-2000 artstyle over 2002-2003 maps" that many mods aim for.

... and with Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary right around the corner, this somewhat pays homage to the long (and nightmarish) development cycle this game had to overcome!


All the bare essentials are included here.

• Ground nodes and NPC-pathing
  
  
• Player clipping
  
  
• High quality light-maps
  
  
• Functional consul-cast (would it really be a beta map without him in it?)

I also took a few pages out of HL1 and 2's deathmatch maps to create a close-quarters PVP/PVE experience, with lots of breakable cover and scattered brush-props, along with health and suit charger stations.


Thank you to the talented people at hl2-beta.ru and the many leakers / asset creators who are responsible for a number of texture recreations featured in this map! All content has been packed into the final product.

This mostly started off as an asset dump for leaked textures and anything pertaining to that "oldtrans" text file in the beta leaks, but through a rather unusual burst in motivation, I decided to finalize it. Hopefully it'll stand out amongst the consistent flow of beta things on the workshop.

If you took the time to read this, I appreciate it! Please let me know if you find any bugs, optimization issues, or other attention-worthy things.

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