Soviet Military Map of City 17
Remember this tiny little thing? I liked it so much that I decided to increase the scope and scale by about a thousand.
Last year at college, I happened to have a week in midwinter where I had no classes and not much to do. Rather than drink myself into a stupor, I decided to do something more productive. Seven months later, I have completed the project.
This is a map of the entirety of Half-Life 2, Episode One and the beginning of Episode Two. It is City 17 as I imagine it would appear on the topographic maps created by the Soviet Red Army.
This is the result of dozens of hours of work. What you see here are Half-Life levels flattened and translated onto a map (with varying levels of faithfulness), a large area of streetplans lifted from Sofia, Bulgaria, and a partially traced coastline, all knit together by my imagination. Most of this completely made up, an imagined geographical context for the events and environments of the game. This is my tribute to the Eastern European setting I have enjoyed so much.
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The very large image file can be found at Deviantart.
Note that you have to zoom in twice to get full detail, and that you can download the complete file if that's easier.
There are also some cropped images showing specific areas for ease of viewing:
Subset of just the urban area
The Coast region, from Water Hazard to Highway 17 to Nova Prospekt
The parts of the city from Episode One, and locations seen in To The White Forest
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The very large image file can be found at Deviantart.
Note that you have to zoom in twice to get full detail, and that you can download the complete file if that's easier.
There are also some cropped images showing specific areas for ease of viewing:
Subset of just the urban area
The Coast region, from Water Hazard to Highway 17 to Nova Prospekt
The parts of the city from Episode One, and locations seen in To The White Forest
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Details:
All the placenames are in Russian. I have retained existing names such as Ravenholm, White Forest, Lighthouse Point and made up the rest. The name of the city is Birkutgrad, after a fictional Polish stakhanovite (shock-worker) from the 1950s. This is, what Stalin renamed the city after the Soviets liberated the (anonymous) country in 1945. It's old, true name was restored in 1989, but we don't know what that is.
By the way, this is a very zoomed-out view of the city. Only major roads are shown, and each block of buildings actually contains many unseen side streets, alleys and thoroughfares.
This map is, loosely speaking a 1:100,000 scale map. I aped the system of labeling and rendering used by the Soviets without strictly adhering to it, using proper documentation when it suited my purposes.
See the distance scale (in meters) at the bottom of the map to get a sense of the distances involved. These are based, on the way, by a few exact Hammer Editor measurements, some rough estimates and some fudging. The distance from Kleiner's Lab to the Citadel (or where it would be), for example, conforms quite closely to the game's opening 3D skybox.
3D skyboxes were a major source of information about elevation and city density. Making the map required gathering a lot of reference images from various chapters. Bending and molding the contradictions of Hammerspace into a rational geographic layout is really a mental process that began years ago.
Black areas are prominent individual structures that stand out from the surrounding buildings. These usually take the form of important official structures, the ubiquitous tower block apartments, or factories and industrial sites.
Black-and-white striped ribbons denoted railroads, while motorways appear in white and red. Major highways have a red striped running down the center. Bridges should be fairly self-explanatory. Blue-outlined streets are canals.
Let me know if a visual Legend or Key would be helpful, and I'll make one. Also, would anyone like a cheat-sheet version of the map, with all the in-game locations pointed out?
I do have some regrets about the map. The large, empty corner of the map is unsightly, but it is impossible to fill such a large space without any inspiration. Secondly, the size of the individual city blocks does not conform very well to the scale of the map. I have, in effect, created an imaginary version of the 1:100,000 scale. Also, the ocean lacks contour lines. I planned to add them, but it gave me a headache.
So please comment on the map, and share any suggestions. It is not in a final state and there are plenty of blank areas that could be embellished, or symbolization that could be added. And if nothing else, take pity on my poor fingers that had to draw all those contour lines with nothing but the mousepad of a laptop, using a trial version of Flash CS5.
Many thanks to sovietmaps.com and http://maps.vlasenko.net/ for making all this possible.
