I think that me map looks ok, but the lighting is pretty poor.

Its simply overbright. Try decreasing the lighting and make it more dark.

Makes you realise how poor the HL2 engine is for its day. No offence, but it looks just like Max Payne 2, not that thats a bad thing, loved the environments in MP2.

Don't use point_spotlight entities on non-spotlight fixtures, as it
really looks unnatural and out of place. There are some parts that are
looking okay (the locker corridor in particular is visually
interesting, even if quite simple), but most of it is brought down by
poor lighting and overly boxy room shapes. Try spicing up the
architecture a little with pillars, alcoves, supports, and so on.

Thanks for the (cough) low res image. 167k is still, quite huge.

The room, what stands out is its rectangularity of it all. It looks like HL1 with HL2 props thrown in for a bit of sprucing. This may be taboo, but my advice is to load some Unreal maps. I recently got to play AND finish Unreal II. I saw some outstanding maps contained within. I also noticed that HL2 should be able to handle almost any recreation, excluding the outdoor areas, nothing can compete with Unreal for shear scale out of doors. :eek:

Be that as it may, ceilings and floors, walls and doors are hardly ever so flat. work on those.

and, work on your sense of "low res" please.

There's a lot of ugly texture stretching going on there... fix that, it
looks so ugly compared to a normal 0.25x0.25 scaled texture.

The area's are a bit too equally lit if you ask me, it makes them feel
monotone and not so interesting as could be. The last screenshot good
with lighting, though. That 'thumbnail' looks bad, especially those
pipes are way too bright and look a bit out of place.

The blood is also placed at odd places... how would blood possible get
up on a wall that high without being everywhere? It feels too 'created'.

This also looks more like a control room than a military base, but that may be just what you wanted with a rocket base...

All in all, it has some sense of place and some nice details already,
but needs work on the lighting, the texturing and tweaking the
architecture which is still somewhat simple in most spots. Also think
about the logic in the map: things must not feel wrong or out-of-place.
Might be a hard thing to grasp but it's important for the immersion
factor.

Good luck with this! :smile: