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Most likely it does.

I was digging through some old emails and I did ask Seamus many years ago why Plantation House and Plains were cut, this is what he replied:

"We never got far on those. The plantation house was built too small to move in properly, though I remember a clever puzzle Austin did for entering it, involving the barn or outhouse somehow."

We clearly know the came pretty far with Plantation House. I wonder if he meant the puzzles and triggers etc, and not object wise. The built too small I guess is because PH is much shorter than the other levels.
And as for the puzzle, I believe it is possible you where going to go through the roof in order to access the building.

So after playing tatu's IT mash up I've finally been able to come to terms with the player exiting the south gate instead of the east. However, the only thing I don't understand is where the road goes, HAMMOND047 "We sealed off the town, save for a few crucial gates — southward to the lowlands, eastward to the power plant and laboratory". The east gate's controls were vandalized, Ripped-out control box on west side of gateway. HAMMOND049 "As we left we vandalized our own locking mechanisms. InGen tolerates no trespassers". So while Hammond says that they didn't seal the east and south gate (the North gate was probably supposed to have metal plates attached like the west one in retail) they destroyed the interior controls, meaning that if/when Hammond returned he would go through the east gate (assuming the controls were intact) before going through the south gate to the "lowlands". So my question is what was so important to Hammond out there?

Draconisaurus made an interesting interpretation of the Lowlands in Beach Reloaded. Might be a source, of inspiration on the subject.

I'm still trying to locate where PH would have ended. maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. If only the 1997 walkthrough had more information on the "balancing beam"

PH would have ended before the PH house. You see the area going towards IJ, between the hills. You can use the start position from IJ to find the exact location in PH where it starts, even tho it is a bit weird where it does.

could you draw a map or make one please? Having a hard time visualizing it.

Left is original PH. On the right is when you import the stream terrain object with its original location into it.

Today I started to look a bit at the Plains file we have again. I wanted to see if there was any instances in Plains that was still present in either b96 or b116.

It appears that there are no objects still present, however, there are 35 terrain objects still present in b96 IT that are in the Plains max file. They are grouped together and have the same instance number as in the Plains max file.

One issue I got here was that it seemed like the groups of instances had been moved from their original location. This made me import the IT terrain, with the Plains part and the early IT terrain combined into 3ds Max along with the Plains max file. My thought here was that maybe one of these terrain groups was still located in their original position when I added the terrain (with its ingame location).

And I found one group; one group that appears to still be using their original location in IT and Plains. How do I know that? The Plains max file is already using the location of the terrain area as present in the Terrain Exporter.
The white circle. This group of terrain objects are still present at the exact location in b96 IT. Same group, same instance numbers.

There are still the issue with different height for the foliage comparing to terrain, and the stream beds ending up on the mountains. But worth to remember is that this Plains version is from 1997, and the IT terrain could've looked very different.

Well, one set of stream textures matches the stream at the beginning ot the IT level. EDIT: Oh, and the other two long streams seem to bw just moved and rotated copies of that one, with the short one just being a cropped one...

The IT terrain not only COULD have been different, it definitely WAS different. Remember that the exit wasn't supposed to be through the gate it is in the release build, that part wasn't accessible.

What about those old versions of the Town? Have you tried combining the MAX files with the one from the Plains?

Well, one set of stream textures matches the stream at the beginning ot the IT level. EDIT: Oh, and the other two long streams seem to bw just moved and rotated copies of that one, with the short one just being a cropped one...

Never thought about that, but I see that now. The stream fits very well with the one from IJ. Draco pointed out that it seems to go towards the sewer/pipe location.

The IT terrain not only COULD have been different, it definitely WAS different. Remember that the exit wasn't supposed to be through the gate it is in the release build, that part wasn't accessible.

Yeah. I know that the IT 3ds max file have a small plain square that says level end at the east/northeast gate, while having a teleport trigger to the north one named something like Level end, but they could've changed it at some point.

What about those old versions of the Town? Have you tried combining the MAX files with the one from the Plains?

I will check tomorrow!

EDIT, here it is:
The early IT terrain is using more terrain space towards the east comparing to retail and 96 that uses more to the west.

tatu wrote:The early IT terrain is using more terrain space towards the east comparing to retail and 96 that uses more to the west.

Interesting. I thought maybe it would match the coordinates for the Plains terrain, but alas, no... EDIT: no, wait, it DOES match. Somehow I thought your image was rotated, but no, it's in the same orientation as my map. Do you realize what that means?
EDIT2: never mind, I thought the other square on your image was the Old Town terrain, now I realize it's only the placeholder for the Plains...
EDIT3: it DOES mean, however, that they moved it further west only when they added the dam as part of the level, after scrapping the Plains level...

Here's my latest version (well, from last November, I haven't added anything newer yet) of the Isla Sorna map, both in XCF (Gimp) and PSD (Photoshop) formats:

http://www.trescom.org/files/docs/SornaMap6-XCF.zip
http://www.trescom.org/files/docs/SornaMap6-PSD.zip

It consists of several layers, including also Zandor's map and rescaled/reoriented SRTM elevation data...
EDIT4: and I've just realized in that version I didn't displace the old terrain heightmap 128 pixels to the right as I should have... version 7 will feature that, too.

tatu wrote:

IJStart.png

Left is original PH. On the right is when you import the stream terrain object with its original location into it.

That's really an odd place to put it tbh. And they were indeed right, PH WAS too short. That does explain what the gorge there is. Perhaps it's the Balancing Beam area. Though that doesn't make sense considering that ij would technically start before that. It doesn't really make much sense from a practicality standpoint tbh. Then again, the Terrain for IJ used to be flatter. A level warp in that location just wouldn't make sense though because of how it would be positioned.

HaroldRedwood wrote:Draconisaurus made an interesting interpretation of the Lowlands in Beach Reloaded. Might be a source, of inspiration on the subject.

I kind of thought the lowlands were meant to be the areas of IJ1 + IJ2 and PH, since the terrain there is lower for the most part than the Town.

That's really an odd place to put it tbh. And they were indeed right, PH WAS too short. That does explain what the gorge there is. Perhaps it's the Balancing Beam area. Though that doesn't make sense considering that ij would technically start before that. It doesn't really make much sense from a practicality standpoint tbh. Then again, the Terrain for IJ used to be flatter. A level warp in that location just wouldn't make sense though because of how it would be positioned.

The pair of small gorges between the end of PH and the start of IJ appear to be where this "balancing beam" thing might have been. And yes, the IJ terrain was indeed flatter, which meant that the end of the early IJ was about 30 feet above the ending in PH. Very strange.

The early IT terrain is using more terrain space towards the east comparing to retail and 96 that uses more to the west.

That seems off to me, especially considering the stream on the right lining up so well with the stream at the end of IJ3. I wonder how IT ended up being moved to the side like that in the early versions? The retail IT looks to be lined up more accurately to the rest of the levels.

TheIdiot wrote:

The early IT terrain is using more terrain space towards the east comparing to retail and 96 that uses more to the west.

That seems off to me, especially considering the stream on the right lining up so well with the stream at the end of IJ3. I wonder how IT ended up being moved to the side like that in the early versions? The retail IT looks to be lined up more accurately to the rest of the levels.

Oh, I think I explained it wrong. The location of the town is still the same. What I meant was that the terrain itself. They cut of parts of the terrain on the east side of town so they could add the parts of Plains in the same terrain file, and keep the normal size of the terrain.
They did not move the actually town. If that explains it better