I was doing some research on how geothermal plants work (research of course being a quick check on Wikipedia) and I decided to base the level archetecture around how the plant works. This is a turbine room. Seawater is pumped in from the shoreline to feed into the igneous rock covering the crater. When pumped into the earth, the water turns to steam, which is collected by a second pipe and sent here to a turbine to spin it. When the steam is piped through the turbine, it is cooled back down and the runoff is sent back into the system.
So this is my prototype for the combine-built turbine room. Obviously it still needs work, but the lighting definitely looks like a keeper. Problems I'm currently trying to fix in the existing layout are some door buttons that aren't functioning properly (despite having correct I/O) and attempting to fix the lighting in this room. As you can see in the first screenshot, the light only seems to detect the posts holding up the catwalk and not the catwalk texture itself. Since props can be alpha-channeled, I'm hoping the same can be done with transparent textures such as this- lit from below, it makes for very dramatic lighting.
