The old wasteland chapters

[Eeyore]

How would've Valve been able to enclose these wide open areas that were supposedly at the bottom of a seafloor? Because the seafloor is pretty big, and the source engine isn't too good with rendering and running detailed wide open areas. Just wondering.

[XJR9000]

They probably would have used a deep crack in the seafloor and the walls you see in the e3_depot map.

[Toasttf]

From what I found in some of the wc maps, they had these huge area portals with triggers that could open and close the AP throughout the map that would split the maps into different sections so rendering it wouldn't be too hard for the engine.

[Eeyore]

So you mean teleportation of the player, or just cutting off parts of that map the player cant see?

[Toasttf]

So you mean teleportation of the player, or just cutting off parts of that map the player cant see?

Yup, cutting off huge parts of the map so you can't see it.
I'm working on a video that shows how it would work. You can see this concept in the map hub_test in the WC map pack.

[Eeyore]

Seems mostly reasonable. But what about that cut enemy the particle storm? That could've also killed or chased players away from the edge of the maps. That's just a theory though.

[Toasttf]

Yeah, I imagine they probably had that as an idea at some point for controlling the player's moment throughout huge open maps, but the npc was scrapped from an early stage. So I guess we'll never fully know how they intended to use the particle storm for such a function.

[Eeyore]

Still, even if sections of the maps were cut off, the overall map size would still be quite small because of the source engine. Especially when it was still in development in 2001-2002.

[Toasttf]

True, I imagine they would have just linked the huge sections into multiple maps until they got the map size to be larger.