2001 City 17 Trainstation Redux

I often lack any reason to look back on my own work, but as 2025 draws to a close I find myself in a reflective mood. I wanted to see how far I have come, and so returned to a project from mid-2022 now armed with a much more thorough understanding of the Source Engine. The project in question was an attempt to depict the interior of Half-Life 2's City 17 trainstation during the game's development circa 2001.

My main areas of improvement were optimizing level geometry, re-thinking the usage of world textures, adding more nuance to the lived-in spaces, redesigning several props and decorations, simplifying the light entities and adding a 3D skybox. It proved to be quite a challenge, as I found that quite a lot of base level geometry had to be rearranged first before I could even think about replacing props and machinery. A lot of material was rebuilt from scratch or replaced with pre-existing prefabs I had already made. The prefabs allowed for a modular approach to establishing motifs and a coherent visual language through the whole structure.

As a bonus I also included the City 17 Industrial district, which is located next door to the station and is the earliest existing playable city location in the Half-Life 2 leak. Fan patches of the leak often put this location at the start of the campaign. This level was dropped from the game by mid-2002, but lived on in a conceptual way as the final game also depicts industrial buildings running alongside the central trainstation.

For my interpretation I applied the same methodology as my other remastered leak maps - staying true to the original choice of textures and composition but increasing the fidelity of level geometry, replacing the lighting and rebuilding anything especially poor from scratch.