Tatooine Desert War

Description
With TheAlpha_07's [i]Tatooine Desert War[/i] we once again revisit that more-important-than-it-should be dustball home planet of the Skywalkers. The map is created with primarily Tatooine: Dune Sea assets, and to no great suprise, feels very similar in execution to that map.

It's worth noting that this is the author's first map. For a first map I noticed a lot of things done well that first-time mappers usually miss out on - there's a different skydome, animated props were used, and lighting was added. I'm especially a fan of that last one; good lighting can be really helpful to making a map look polished.

There are some weaknesses as well, though. For one, the map is too darn big. A good try at remedying this was made by adding lots of speeders and other vehicles, but the real problem lies in the fact that the AI combat moves very slowly on big maps, and the speeders did not aid a solution to this. Secondly - and the biggest problem, which will no doubt make some not want to download this - is the filesize. There appear to have been very minor changes to the sides, but these sides changes were done by changing the entire side. As a result, there are about 6 stock sides in the addon folder's side folder, which makes the map more than ten times the size it needs to be - literally. It would also be nice if the author took the time to add in the correct shipped sounds for the GCW vehicles.

It's too bad that the map is so large, because it's not a bad map - in fact, filesize aside, it's easily well above average for first-time maps. However - a suggestion to the author - getting the filesize optimized would be the first thing I would work on before I plan to release another version of this or a different map.

-Mav