Since im in a good mode and have nothing else to do i chose to take a closer look on your map and give you some feedback.
My overall impression of the map is that it looks pretty good, very
good in the "main room", but in the other two small rooms the detail
level is depressingly low.
Just take a look at this picture:
The detail level is near zero which is bad in my opinion. You could
easily make it look so much better without spending weeks at the
computer, just add some pillars, supports or something like that.
One other thing i noticed was the sharp shadow to the right of the pic.
Personally I think sharp shadows is perfectly OK, as long as they dont appear in the half-life engine, it just looks awful.
To fix this you could easily add the bounce option in RAD if youre
using batchcompiler and then set the number to something between one
and three.
Heres another example of the low detaillevel in some areas:
First of all i wonder why there almost no red light in this room despite two gigantic red lamps.
Secondly, why are there water falling down there? At first i thought it
was some kind of a portal but then i realized its just made for the
looks. Well it doesnt look good at all to tell the truth. Remove that
thing completely or change the texture of the water to something more
interesting.
Very nice touch, looks awesome. But i would prefer if you had only one
of these in this map to make it more special. But thats only my opinion.
Heres a pic on the good parts =).
This is the main room and I can clearly see that you have spent most
work on this part which is good, always put the most work on the main
areas.
I love the way you have done those lightingeffects in the ceiling, it looks really great.
That swinging bridge with the "quad damage" thing in the middle is also
a VERY GOOD touch, really a great idea (dont be suprised if you see
something familiar in a map by me in the future ^_^)
Final thoughts:
Your choise of textures isnt very good in my opinion, the lack of
detail in the textures gives the overall detail impression a smack in
the face.
If i where you i would look around for other wadfiles with better textures.
There are alot of great stuff out there, you just have to find it =).
furthermore I would be delighted if you did something about the areas
around the main room which, all of them, looks very dead and they have
no details whatsoever.
Now you might think that im a bit mean to you by saying all these bad
words about youre map. The reason why im so hard on you is because i
can see that you can do alot better than this.
If you are afraid of increasing the r_speeds to much then I can give you some advice.
First of all you simply dont need to make to many faces on all the
rounded corners and cirkles. Im pretty sure that you could decrease the
number of faces pretty significantly and yet no one would notice.
If you still want the player to be guided around the corners you would simply fix this with some clip brushes.
I always make my curved cornes like this:
I cant say if my way of making it reduces the r_speeds, compared to yours, but personally i think its a clean and simple method.
As i said, the map looks pretty ok but if you could change the points I mentioned above, it would look superb.
If you change the issues i mentioned above or not is entierly up you,
but if you dont then please bare this thread in mind when you make your
next map :wink: .
