I can see a lot of work has gone into the trims and such already, I think maybe it's the contrast between the trims and the main texture that isn't different enough.
Let's be honest, the map still looks very nice and this is purely a stylistic suggestion on my part. There's nothing wrong with saying "this is my map and I want it to look like this". 

I was just elaborating on what could be meant by 'breaking up large walls'. The map does look really nice! I love those arches, and the mood of the lighting, in the shots.

Negke is right about the marksurfaces thing, but I know what it's like to be surfing the limits, and you get the map to compile nicely, why fuck with it at that point, when it's already looking really nice.

TBH it looks pretty decent to me man, go with your heart :) 

every shot you've put up so far. 

Well they are quite flat walls. But lots of popular mappers like czg have quite plain walls. I always try to pack as much detail into walls as possible, but then I could never make any of my levels very big. That's the trade-off of putting in lots of detail. Players prefer bigger levels over lots of fine detail. 

you can make one actual brush-based template and use it elsewhere as point entities

Negke, can you (or anybody) explain how exactly to do this? It's something I could possibly use in a couple of places.

There were some brushes that absolutely had to be changed and when I fixed them it blew the marksurfaces over the limit again. 

You can first try this: open the map file in a text editor and move all recently-added brushes (the ones after which the limit was exceeded) higher up, preferably to where the older brushes in the particular area are. This can arbitrarily lower the marksurfaces again.

The template trick is essentially a modelindex hack. You can look it up in mce.map (available on my site), it's used for the light sources and ammo pickups.
The original ("template") entity is a brush-based info_notnull located at 0 0 0. While this location isn't absolutely necessary, I wouldn't put it elsewhere because then it'd make placing the clones a pain in the ass. It's also lit there. I strongly recommend moving it up in the .map so it's the very first entity after worldspawn for easier reference. To save an edict, remove it on mapstart with "think" "SUB_Remove" or killtarget.

Then you can put point info_notnulls where you want the clones to appear and give them the corresponding values of the template, e.g.

"model" "*1"
"modelindex" "2"

This will create nonsolid copies of the original brush model which do not add to the model limit but take up an edict slot. They can be rotated, too.
It's possible to further modify their 'state', so to speak. For example, you can make them solid or turn them into static entities (=no edict) by adding "think" "func_wall" or "func_illusionary" and "nextthink" "0.1". However, this will override any custom rotation! 

I tried to do a similar thing with func_doors through qc. It even worked as well, after Preach explained some of the nuances of collision generation.

Nobody cared though. 

I may have to give that a try. It's a bit more complex than I thought it would be, but it could prove to be useful. Thanks for the explanation.

As far as moving brushes in the .map file to reduce marksurfaces, I've never tried that. However, my usual trick is to copy a large group of brushes that are near each other, delete them, save the map, then paste the brushes back in. I've always assumed that this is also moving the brushes around in the .map file. At any rate, it will often reduce the marksurfaces by several hundred.

I only do this when BSP goes crazy and ups the marksurfaces by a huge amount when some insignificant change was made. I don't worry about it when the change in marksurfaces seems reasonably proportionate the whatever change I've made in the map. 

That was cool. It's also the kind of thing "external model" support in Quoth is meant to help with. Currently having an actual external file is a bit cumbersome to install (and to delete when the map is finished though), so it's a bit of a hard sell to get working.

One potential solution could be to create an "internaliser" tool, which would operate on your base bsp file. It would look for all your entities which reference an external bsp file, load that external file, and bake them into the bsp as an internal model. In effect, it's formalising negke's entity hack above, but in a way that doesn't require fiddling with brush order to get it working. Plus because you created the external model independently, you've got the freedom to light it without the rest of the map interfering, and easily set the rotation centre.

There is a second solution to the loose file difficulty, but I'm afraid I'm not yet at liberty to say...Or I'd just really like to see the internaliser become reality so I've got to sell it to someone with the bsp know-how. 

Bsp referencing compartmentalised sections of itself... 

Was just idle experimentation really. Whilst I tip my hat to those who struggle to colour within the lines of bsp1 limits, I decided not to bother with it.

The internalizer you mention in fact sounds something like the skip utility, which moved brush face around so they wouldn't be visible. 

Thank you! 

<@Bal> http://www.born-robotic.net/content/maps/balostepisode.zip
<@sock> someone should re-work them into maps with vanilla gameplay 

Too bad there aren't much monsters to fight, in these giant maps.

I guess I'll have to play them with the DMSP mod. 

Oh lord these maps look great. I can't believe these are sitting around unfinished. None of my scrap levels are anywhere near this kind of quality or completion (I usually rough out a couple of rooms, you seem to make entire maps!) 

Those superb maps doesn't do anything with the DMSP mod. WTF !?

Why, O why Lord !? The b1blue, b1office and b1rocks are so cool, why not finish'em ?? 

There are no info_player_deathmatch entities... 

There are no deathmatch starts in those maps, which is why they won't work with dmsp. The map files are there though, so I guess it'd be fairly quick to throw some in and -onlyents compile. 

Extending Daikatana mainmenu graphics for widescreen support. Fun!

http://spiney.me/files/etc/back0.png 

If there's one thing I loved about Daikatana it was the texture-work. So rich and detailed. 

Can somebody do a hack of Daikatana to make those two side kicks Invulnerable? 

City Blocks 

but those yellow windows, i don�t know. 

I like it, very quaint. Almost thief-like in some respects.

Not everything has to be some outrageous structure. 

I'm kind of surprised since I usually love the yellow windows, but I agree with mfx. They don't look bad but maybe a more toned down intensity or different colour would be better? Might be worth tinkering with.

Such a minor thing, but of course it's hard to find serious flaws with your shots.