New feature!

Working elevator in the mine shaft. It has an open top for people at
the top of the shaft to drop some grenades into it. Also, the wheels
turn with the elevator, and the motors emit sound.

You really shouldn't replace your images. Its preferable to post new links to new images. This way if someone comes in late, they will know in what direction you have traveled.

It helps to know what you have replaced and built anew.

remember them cubemaps (noting the water)

lol, to be honest I'm surprised how important the road part actually was! THis is exactly what I was missing! Sure it needs work from here but it brings all the buildings together very nicely! Looking good!

YET AGAIN new screenshots. :razz: I've been taking into consideration all
the suggestions and ideas posted, and as you can see have added some
alpha roadways to the map. It's about half-done now; all the major
stuff is in place and all that's left is nitpicky stuff which will take
several weeks.

Yes, I know there's a texture error due to that damn Hammer bug (the
one where blended textures invert during compile) underneath one of the
trucks..

It's not only about the grass, like Captain P said add a road, some concrete places, parkings ect.

The sprites from grass textures shouldn't have any major impact on FPS at all. If you have FPS problems make sure the doors and windows of the buildings all go to different sides or are closed on one side so the interior hasn't to be rendered from everywhere.

PS: It's still way too dark. Compare it to the darkest official map, dm_lockdown. Turn down monitor brightness untill you can just barely play dm_lockdown, so that it's almost completely dark but you can still navigate around and see everything. Then load your own map and compare with the same monitor brightness. You'll see how bright even dm_lockdown, a night map, has to be to be played under more extreme conditions (which aren't all that absurd, playing on a CRT monitor at day gives you the same results).

I noticed you have some hills there, but the rest is still flat and it stings. Just cover the whole terrain with displacement maps and make it nice and rolling. Using blending textures is a good idea here, too. A few detail sprites shouldn't do much harm methinks, they fade out at some distance anyway.
The lighting and athmosphere is coming along nicely now, but it still feels like a couple of loosely, too-strictly 90-degree, placed buildings with nothing in between. And usually, there's roads in such places instead of grass only. :smile:

If you want to use a different grass texture (perhaps one with a blend in it to help you limit that texture repetition), then just write a new VMT file. You don't need to use any custom textures. There are loads of tutorials out there about writing your own materials and they discuss how to use blends, detail sprites, etc...

Well, everyone keeps complaining about the "flat" grass.. thing is,
although they're hard to see I put in several displacements to add
bumps to the grass. They only provided one grass texture I know of that
doesn't have those sprites (I don't really want to use the sprite grass
because it might add lag to the map, which is already starting to crash
from too many items -- at least that's what I think is causing it). I
did notice however, that even without VIS or RAD the map ran just fine
on my friend's computer. The only major difference is his processor
doesn't have a retard helmet on (read: it isn't a Celeron like mine)..
So maybe a bunch of grass sprites wouldn't hurt too much.

So.. I'm throwing the question on the floor: should I change the texture scheme to incorporate textures with sprite grass?

Note that this isn't the only change I plan on for the outdoor area.
Almost everything else is finished -- I just need to add furniture in
the shack by the newly-added train station.

This is looking better and better. I could imagine getting from building to building could be fun in a way. Although that's not the typical DM way of a layout (reminds me more of CS or a realistic themed mod with objectives) but it could work.

Still, don't keep the flat grass areas! Get rid of them before it's to late! They're stealing the atmosphere and making it all look very video-gamish.

PS: make it so you can jump up the roofs of those buildings. That's easy to do and always fun!