It's a nice looking level but imo far too big, open and empty.

I appreciate that you can't add much more to it for players to use as cover as it'll further decrease performance, but atm this is heaven for crossbow & magnum snipers and I imagine not much fun for the rest. If an opponent has a crossbow or magnum all you can do is jump & strafe around like a madman and hope he runs out of ammo - the sheer potential distance between opponents means that even the MGs aren't much use outside.

Also, you really do need to limit visibility between the two main open areas. Performance is really poor. My PC (P4 2.4, 512mb, FX5600) was chugging along at 10fps running around by myself - I wouldn't be able to even play this online at all. You can still keep the nice feature of being on the dividing dam-type structure and look into either of the open areas, but rather than direct visibility you can require players to run the other side of a vis-blocking wall to change to the other open area.

Sorry for all these negative sounding comments. Like I say, it looks nice and the ambience is good, but it's enormous size is a major problem imo.

I ran into some similar problems with my contest map. Not knowing the limits of hl2 yet, and my natural tendancy to push more towards the grandiose, my map ended up being far too big, bloated, and hungry for the ole fps.

I'm currently in the process of chopping off my favorite portion of the map, and making a smaller map centered around that area. The result should be something much more playable, size and performance wise.

Screw the contest. If your map has obvious problems (like mine did), the chances of you winning are fairly slim anyway. Go to town on that sucker. Rip it apart, until you have something really solid that plays well and looks great. All the heartache this map has given you, after dozens of revisions and major renovations, will only make your next map that much stronger. I see lots of people give up on maps and just start over...while this is not a bad thing, it is also good to have a couple of real nightmare projects that you have to beat into submission, and you are determined to do right, even if it means tearing apart what you thought was a final map.