Very motivating my friend.

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.

Nah thanks for the comments. I'm not sure why it ran so bad. I play online with a p4 1.6 Ghz 512 ram and have no problems. Who knows. I guess I tried but failed horribly. I got some ideas on how to improve the FPS a lot but haven't had the chance to impliment them cause I don't know, if we are susposed to mess with our maps after we submit them or not.

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.

What do you think needs to be tweaked?

When you have a really huge open map Details and tweaking can be a problem.

Doesn't look finished. Theres a lot of tweaks that could be done.

Powersurge is just the name. It takes place at a more or less decaying Dam. I did make the cliffs lower displacement because of the issues with FPS. I would also try nightime but it seems a lot of people are making nighttime maps.

It's to late to change things now. Thanks for the comments though.

here's what to do, change the skybrush to a darker, nighttime picture. This is about power, and what better way to imply electricity than LIGHTS! Also if it is dark outside, no one will notice the REALLLY blocky cliffs (i am not insulting, I am saying that you can keep the cheaper cliffs and cut down on the lag in your map[lag that would happen if you made the cliffs really elaborate])

The fog was corrected so it doesn't wash everything out, I don't have the final map to update the pics. I should know the link thing but I forget things from time to time. Sorry for size didn't realize they were that huge.