First two shots still looked similar to some of the recent CSS maps, but especially the last shot really does it. Adding some more trees might improve the scene somewhat though, and having a forest in your 3D skybox would be great.
Reminds me of some sort of fantasy setting, like a good place to live or such. Definitely looks good. Keep up the work man!
It really has style, that castle of yours. 
And indeed, the large blocks get kinda repetetive and I think the map is a bit too dark overall. Besides that, it does look good indeed.
Oh, and for a 3D skybox... can I see high mountain peeks on the horizon with tall, gloomy castles on them with lots of high towers?
Those textures still have a certain cartoony feel over them now and then. Too clean indeed, but also too cartoony to feel right. Hard to explain I guess.
Lighting looks much better now though.
It's definitely important. Personally, I find the HL2 texture set uninspiring. Too pushing for a certain style, a style that's not mine. So I would definitely like a site that encourages some texture work.
Not that one cant do without, but it'd be a great thing to have.
I'm doing some textures occasionally, whenever I feel like doing a different themed map. Which hasn't been a lot recently, but anyway.
A texture artists community sounds great to me. Sharing techniques, idea's and commenting on each others work as well as offering the work to mappers and modellers to get more publicity... sounds good.
I don't even like photorealism so much. I found HL2's texture library much less usefull than HL's, for example. Probably less inspiring for me, or more restricting me to a realistic style.
vip_killskybox?
Simple but nice.
Except for that shoutbox, and those pop-ups that disappear when the focus switches to another window.
Oh, and use a program like XAT to decrease those screenshots filesize. A 800 x 600 image that's 250 KB? Could easily be 50 KB without noticeable quality loss.
At a first glance, it looked pretty convincing really.
Another note though: the newspaper dirt on the floor looks slightly out of place. Garbage is usually found around full garbage-cans and such. There's just a little too much garbage on one spot on an otherwise clean parking lot. Just felt odd.
Oh, you mean, since those Mars projects are delayed anyway...
Who is that Jack Something anyway then? 
Let's just ignore him if he can't carry on good arguments. No need for a big flamewar or something like that. Makes us look stupid too.
Never heard of him before (living in the Netherlands and not being so active on gaming forums, rather on modding forums), but reading his responses to e-mails doesn't give me a good impression of him...
Just been on vacation into Germany, on a freight ship owned by some friends of us. Germany looks good from the river-side, lots of industry a la Half-Life 2's Water Hazard level.
Now I've got a few weeks left untill I got to go back to school. I'm trying to finish those 3 years I've got left in 2 years, hope I succeed in that.
School ain't so bad bytheway. Driving teachers nuts with a little code that moves interface buttons away from the mouse isn't so bad, is it?
Those textures look good and you've used them well I think. Good to see some variation from the standard HL2 themes too.
Just some alpha shots from the map I'm currently working on, Vector-Y. It's my entry for the Snarkpit competition.
It's a factory-themed, twisted level, where several parts of the level are rotated so you'll be walking on walls and support beams and such.
[Blocked Image: http://theta.main-hosting.com/~captain/images/vectory_a1.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://theta.main-hosting.com/~captain/images/vectory_a2.jpg]
[Blocked Image: http://theta.main-hosting.com/~captain/images/vectory_a3.jpg]
Add some random thunderstrikes in the 3D skybox bytheway. They would fit perfectly with the current mood.
I think I liked the 509 error page more... 
I like the greenish fog and lighting. Gives the map a distinct feeling.
But as the others said, fix the sky/fog matching.
I like the glowing lights. They're team-colored, I suppose?
A wooden crate that actually contains something that takes up most of the crate's space would be revolutionary, yeah...
Never heard people calling textures mesh before... I think they're a bit meshed up.
Anyway, nice crate. Next: barrel? :wink:
