As said, the look of the box is a concern, work a bit on the edges for
example vary the height and depth of the walls, but don't just have
them as walls, make it a bit more realistic and have somewhere where
the T's and CT's could have come in (though personally I would block
this off with turrents etc). Also put some mountains in the background
aswell, it will add to the depth and feel. Looking at screen 2 there
doesn't look like theres a lot of cover, maybe some small hills like in
screen shot 3, but again vary them. The water bit looks very good, I
would definatly leave this in, but there are also lots of different
trees which come with Hammer, possibly try some more variation of these
aswell.

[edit] A good example of the variation thing i'm going on about: http://www.mallosworld.co.uk/map/01.jpg

I have also been getting concerned over it, and most of the servers now adays, use these maps.. grrr. They suck.

I am getting genuinely concerned over this trend of boxes with stuff in them.

I noticed quite a few submitted very recently. One of the authors was a complete prick about it even.

shrugs

I hope its a passing fad.

I do kinda like screen #3. Its very hard to tell its a box from that spot. Perhaps a better skybox and some visblocking terrain would help?

Ya, you got it pretty much right. It is a bunch of models in a square..lol, but that's ok, it was what I was aiming for with this one, but the low visibility "fun" awp_map was just something I always wanted to play especially in the swap/raining environment

And thanks for the tutorial link

AWP_swamp?

It looks like a lot of props stuck into a big square. Sorry, but perhaps it's better to leave this map for now and think of a little more intersting theme for your next map. There are too many "fun" maps out there, they're okay for some private clan or lan matches but not necessarily something you will get much attention for in public.

A nice and complete tutorial for optimizing (high fps) your map:

http://www.student.kun.nl/rvanhoorn/Optimization.htm