I've always felt like the lighting is a little bland.
Although, in recent versions you've done based things like increasing the lightmap resolution on various surfaces.
By the way, the combination of that and the custom assets is a killer, and the map is 55 mb because of it.
But anyway, I've always kinda felt like the map suffers from the "Borneo problem" where there isn't enough contrast between the direct and ambient light. It doesn't help that the skybox and textures all combine with this to lead the map's colour palette towards one ambiguous, drab, low-contrast shade of brown-yellow.
To illustrate my point, I did something very naughty and decompiled the map to play around with the lighting to see if I could achieve a result I liked better.
So here are some comparison shots, and you can judge for yourself which you like more.
Here's what I did:
-Changed the sun's colour/brightness to 251 230 191 700
-Lowered the ambient brightness to 120
-Shifted the sun's yaw by 10 degrees (basically irrelevant)
-Changed the sun's pitch to -42
-Changed the skybox from sky_granary_01 to sky_goldrush_01 (this was a mistake)
Now, this admittedly isn't a fair comparison for either side.
But I hope from this you can glean some insight into how higher contrast in lighting can make an area look less washed out and monotone.
If you could up your contrast like this, add some little trims, cranes and balconies protruding out from the big brick walls and change the sun's yaw to mostly target these big brick walls, you'd pretty much be solving every detailing issue I have with the map all at once.
And I think that'd be pretty based.
Also, are the bricks even bumpmapped? I swear a normal map exists for them in the game's files, and I swear I remember it making them look 10000x better.
