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[HRCS] HL2 Ravenholm Trainyard (d1_town_05)
Description Discussions0 Comments16 Change Notes
   
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Content Type: Addon
Addon Type: Map
Addon Tags: Scenic, Realism
File Size
Posted
Updated
707.775 MB
18 Oct, 2021 @ 6:41pm
1 Nov, 2021 @ 3:28pm
2 Change Notes ( view )
Created by
legoj15
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[HRCS] HL2 Ravenholm Trainyard (d1_town_05)

In 1 collection by legoj15
High Resolution Cubemaps & Shadows Maps
46 items
Description
High Resolution Cubemaps & Shadows

Another map where I showcase the maximum extent of the Source Engine's static lighting system using GMod's 64bit compile tools. Features 256x256 resolution cubemaps and the highest resolution shadows possible without the compile tools throwing errors due to to many vertices.

Compiled for LDR & HDR and retains full functionality as long as you have Half-Life 2 purchased & installed on Steam, and mounted in Garry's Mod.

Map name is d1_town_05_hrcs, and can be found in the "Half-Life 2" map section.

Progressing backwards upon spawning in will take you to map d1_town_04_hrcs if you are subscribed to it. Completing the level as you would in Half-Life 2 will take you to map d2_coast_01_hrcs if you are subscribed to it.

Misc info:
  • The end of this map marks the end of the "We Don't go to Ravenholm" chapter and beins the "Highway 17" chapter, which takes place along the coast.
  • Low definition trees were swapped out for their higher-poly counterparts
  • The skybox has been opened up so persistent details throughout the map are always visible (like the water towers)
  • Sometime after its original release (either Episode 1's release or the Orange Box release), Half-Life 2 was updated to receive HDR support. All maps prior to d1_town_05 did not have HDR lightmaps, but retained their classic LDR lightmaps from the original release. Starting with d1_town_05 and throughout the coast levels, the maps were recompiled with HDR support, but only HDR support, meaning if you had HDR off/LDR Only on, the map became fullbright (no shadows or lighting information), this remained unfixed to this day (though Half-Life 2: Update probably has LDR and HDR lightmaps for all maps). I have compiled this map with both LDR and HDR lightmaps so that you can choose which aesthetic you wish to play.
  • Adding to the previous bullet point, in retail Half-Life 2, it is common to see terrain detail, which are little sprites or simple models, like grass or cattails, that are procedurally added to the map at compile time. Terrain detail is only available on the WorldVertexTransition shader, which is meant for displacement geometry, which is complex geometry capable of concave deformations, easier to make natural surfaces out of, and with the help of the WorldVertexTransition shader, capable of blending 2 textures together seamlessly, whilst optionally having terrain detail place upon the surface. Either purposefully or unknowingly, the mappers of Half-Life 2 commonly used WorldVertexTransition materials on brushes, which are the simple blocks maps are made of, contrasting to the much more complex displacements. In hammer, Valves map editor, WorldVertexTransition materials on brushes show their 2nd base texture, while in game after compilation brushes with WorldVertexTransition materials show their 1st base texture. Another thing to mention is that terrain detail, depending on how its configured in detail.vbsp, is usually present on the 2nd base texture, so in the case of the super common nature/red_grass.vmt material, when placed on a brush, it will show its 1st base texture, which is dirt, but spawn grass sprite terrain detail on it, while when on a displacement, it needs to be blended to its 2nd base texture to emit the grass sprite terrain details. I'm guessing in an earlier version of VBSP (the program that compiles VMF source files into BSP map files), if a brush had a material with the WorldVertexTransition shader on it, it would go ahead and bake the material on the brush, but throw a warning into the console, stating
    Warning: using WorldTwoTextureBlend on a non-displacement surface. Support for this will go away soon. Warning: WorldTwoTextureBlend found on a non-displacement surface. This wastes perf for no benefit.
    It's possible that this warning was erroneous, as while WorldTwoTextureBlend was a completely different shader that appeared to have similar results, as it actually rendered two layers of materials, one on the bottom, the other on top with an alpha channel that would let the bottom material be visible, WorldVertexTransition didn't suffer from the same issue of layered materials. But either during the Episode 1 or Orange Box update, Valve updated VBSP to include a "patched" version of every WorldVertexTransition material that was included in a map, and this patched version would be used on brushes in place of the original shader. The patched material had 2 notable changes, the first being that any reference to a second texture was removed, and second being that the material's shader was changed from WorldVertexTransition to LightmappedGeneric, a simpler shader, relatively speaking. LightmappedGeneric doesn't support terrain detail, so in every map that Valve recompiled that had brushes with WorldVertexTransition materials that emitted terrain detail, those brushes no longer had grass sprites. Half-Life 2: Update "resolved" this issue by making all brushes that they thought should have terrain detail on them, displacements, but this caused the texture to become green grass, instead of brown dirt, which while more realistic, isn't how Half-Life 2 originally looked, whether that look was intentional or not. I have re-implemented the terrain detail on brushes bug on all the HRCS maps, since I have some reason to believe the effect was used intentionally, to some extent.
  • This map is not from a decompile
16 Comments
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MF DOOM enjoyer 1 May @ 8:26am 
hmm yea ive done my on testin with that 1 is unstable
but uh peak map
legoj15  [author] 30 Apr @ 12:08pm 
For this map, it was a lightmap scale of 2. Going down to 1 caused VBSP to crash with an error saying there were too many vertices.
MF DOOM enjoyer 30 Apr @ 11:43am 
what was the general lightmap scale you used?
rajjiasus420 19 Sep, 2024 @ 11:52am 
hello
melc 7 May, 2022 @ 7:30am 
Thank you so much. I finally managed to fix that too for the steam version.
legoj15  [author] 6 May, 2022 @ 4:24pm 
I had never even though to mention this to Valve, it has always just been some little quirk that I found a workaround for, though I feel my email would fall on blind eyes, since the map tools development team is probably different from the gameplay programming team.

Nevertheless, I was able to get the original behavior of detailsprites on brushes by creating a wvt_patch vmt that is just a 1:1 copy of the original WorldVertexTransition material and placing it in the appropriate spot in the game's material folder; for instance, for this map specifically, I set up the red_grass_wvt_patch.vmt file that I modified to be a copy of the original red_grass in such a way that the file path looks like this: "GarrysMod\garrysmod\materials\maps\d1_town_05_hrcs\nature\red_grass_wvt_patch.vmt"
I think this works because VBSP reads from the game directory first before reading from the BSP file, contrary how it works in-game, but that is just speculation.
melc 6 May, 2022 @ 8:39am 
The nature/red_grass mystery has been puzzling me for a long time. I've tried to fix it in my vanilla version of HL2 only to open the can of worms that are terrain detail sprites in Source. I was very confused because in a lot of other maps, nature/red_grass was working fine on brushes.
Thank you for writing that part, it really clarified a lot of stuff for me. Also, I am disappointed to see that the guy that made Update didn't properly fix the missing red_grass in d1_town_05. Update was disappointing a lot more other ways, but I digress.

Have you sent Valve an email about this yet? Hopefully, they could do what you did to "bug" it back to how it was intended to look like. They might do it because they just recently fixed a 12 year old bug regarding the combine deathpose animations.

By the way, how did you manage to "bug" the terrain detail on brushes?
[UA]Віктор Молокан 28 Oct, 2021 @ 5:26am 
what is the weight all light, in megabayte?
T639493 27 Oct, 2021 @ 5:43am 
does this have hdr?
Wolffman109 25 Oct, 2021 @ 9:22pm 
Hey, I don't know where the map is. Which category is it in?