Valhalla

Description
"Valhalla," by Press_Tilty, is not a stunning recreation of the mythical home of the champions of the Norse gods, it is instead a recreation of a map from Halo with which I am unfamiliar.

As an example of a new mapper's work, it's not bad. It's not [i]great[/i], and I can't speak at all as for its accuracy to the source material, but standing alone, it's a decent map with a good design. The map itself could use a little more object population (or some scattered foliage), but I like the overall design.

It needs work in a few areas, though. First of all, the mountains (if that's what they're supposed to be) surrounding the map look pretty bad - either make them look like real hills, or waterfalls, or mountains, or whatever - or just get rid of them. Continuing from that, you need to make the skydome use a model that mirrors the texture on its lower half (Kashyyyk's or Coruscant's sky dome meshes are a good example) so that when the flyers take off, you don't see a big ugly black lower half of your sky. On the subject of flyers and other vehicles - add in your vehicle sounds. It's a little jarring using vehicles that I can't hear.

You also have a few floating objects - make sure that all your trees, CPs, etc. are grounded or sunk below-ground. Test these in-game, because ZE won't always be a perfect representation. One other minor quibble - make sure you don't blend more than two textures at once, otherwise the texture borders will become very hard-edged. You can see an example of this in the back of the map near the stream bank.

All in all it's a decent map, but it needs some work. Give it a try if it sounds appealing.

-Mav