i looked through the map file and i found "CraftedPatryk", which is a song that was made by the creator of this map. i'm not sure exactly how important this is, but i just thought that it was weird.

Heard footsteps multiple time while myself i was crouching and not moving at all.

Il look into this more with my friend.

there is an image file embedded. and it is in fact corrupted. things about it need to be modified.

I do not know how to modify this image properly to get it to load, but search for "‰PNG", that will be the start of the image, and the end is "IEND®B`‚".
The size of this image is 144 Kilobytes.

Originally posted by S.D.U AUS:

there is an image file embedded. and it is in fact corrupted. things about it need to be modified.

I do not know how to modify this image properly to get it to load, but search for "‰PNG", that will be the start of the image, and the end is "IEND®B`‚".
The size of this image is 144 Kilobytes.

i think if anyone wanted to recover the image from its unreadable state, they would need to know a LOT about the PNG format. also, it looks like the 2 found hidden pieces of text were hidden in the image data, maybe there are more hidden in there

Originally posted by halfsine:

Originally posted by S.D.U AUS:

there is an image file embedded. and it is in fact corrupted. things about it need to be modified.

I do not know how to modify this image properly to get it to load, but search for "‰PNG", that will be the start of the image, and the end is "IEND®B`‚".
The size of this image is 144 Kilobytes.

i think if anyone wanted to recover the image from its unreadable state, they would need to know a LOT about the PNG format. also, it looks like the 2 found hidden pieces of text were hidden in the image data, maybe there are more hidden in there

You can also get the image by extracting it using BSPZIP (in the bin folder, requires command prompt). If you force this image to be viewed it is just a garbled mess with a few distinct patterns in the images.
Yes, to recover it would likely be an arduous task considering how big it actually is, even if it is possible in the first place.

If I had to guess, especially with this finding, this is probably just a case of a map somehow being partially overwritten onto an existing file, one that was evidently already corrupted. Maybe a pointer got flipped while it was being saved or smth, I have no idea. Most of the map's unnatural features could very reasonably just be the consequences of corruption: (Keep in mind that everything below is just conjecture, I have never worked with Source before, and I don't know of its inner workings)

- The eerie, red fog could easily be explained by whatever value that controls that being partially corrupted, causing the fog to take on a color of #FF0000.

- I have no idea what could have happened to cause the HUD to be removed, but I will say that the HUD isn't present in Half Life 2 until you pick up the HEV suit. Maybe some value associated with that got flipped? No idea. The HUD disappears because cl_drawhud is set to 0. (This is according to a comment that @starstalkere posted)

- The lack of physics collisions is probably due to whatever mesh that Havok (Source's physics engine) uses to function having been removed or invalidated. This also explains why living NPCs and players can stand on the ground just fine; evidently, NPCs handle collisions in a different way. If I were to guess, this is an artifact of Source being, at its core, built on the Quake engine.

- Some values for some of the brush's polygons must have been flipped as well. I found one floor split down the middle between white and black, metal and soil, respectively, in the same way that you'd cut a sandwich in half.

- I did spot one polygon that seemed to just stretch out through one of the walls and into the void. Its vertices must have been messed with somehow. This is probably what causes the map to crash. (By typing "ent_fire goodbye kill" into the console, you can stop the map from booting you. It's a script that's doing that, not an engine error. (Also according to @starstalkere's comment))

- As for the map's sudden appearance and its solid-color textures? (These are apparently Source's default textures, according to the same comment) I have absolutely no rational explanation for that, but it's probably not foul play, this is just not how black hat hackers behave.





UPDATE: I did some tests. HL2 NPCs and even nextbots from DRGbase function just fine on this map, but they phase through the floor the moment you kill them. This confirms that the map has an intact nodemap and navmesh, it's just Havok's physics that are broken. However, decals don't seem to be able to render on the brush.