Posted by kan3
Pros: Excellent concepts and attention to detail
Cons: Basic items listed below
Improvements: Cubemaps are overblown in areas while too small in others - color correction entity fades are incorrect and have very abrupt transitions - lighting is very overblown in areas while nearly dark in others - vis corrections could be made in areas(my assumption) but obviously won't decompile to check
Notes: I'll speak more from another mapper's perspective instead of someone who generally plays maps, as I want to be honest from a technical standpoint. Your level design makes no realistic sense. All of the objects in the map feel realistic and correct but a lot of the areas/props make no real world sense as to why they are there. This could be entirely by design for layout purposes or simply because you worked section by section instead of with one overall concept design. It simply feels like most things are there to fill space.
I'd be very curious to see your next map.
Color correction transition is one of those things i want to change in the final version but I want some gameplay feedback before working more on this map because I really prefer doing another one if it isn't working.
About the cohesion of the map... I wanted to (and did) use just the textures and models avaliable with css/hl2 because this was just a test map I made while I was learning hammer and in the other hand I didn't want it to look like all the rest of the maps, I wanted to do something different, I get bored of playing with the same combinations of textures/props in all the maps. Next map I'm planing will be custom and because that have a more specific theme.
About the lighting... There are light and dark area due to the sun angle that creates those shadows, but anyway, there are no important dark spots that will mess up gameplay, most of em are made just to make it look interesting with nonaction zones like screen3 or to give a bit adcantatge to one side like the ramps shadow zone (prevents rushing a bit).
Light is oversaturated intentionally, I didn't want to make it look realisitic, you'vegot crysis for that, I just wanted to use and combine some bright/oversaturated colors people usually like(for example fy woods) and train lighting a bit while I was doing the map.
Most of the cubemaps where higher but due to filesize I had to reduce em, also full bright/dark faces have lightmapscale from 32 to 512 (I reducedt 10mb doing that without loosing much quality)
About vis, there is one spot outside I could try to solve with more areaportals but it has a lot of problems. Anyway, everything else is hinted and has many portals.
1MB4!
