Mr. X's first map was MM6YAM.
You don't have an excuse.
Because everyone totally starts off well, right? Except it was terrible fighting there, until Mr. X did the adequate changes to it, making it dozens of times better.
VS, I'll take a look at this map later and give you some tips. Since you said you're just seeing what you can do, I'll go easy on it and hopefully, you can learn something that'll help you later.
EDIT: Alright, I've looked at it. I see that you have mastered making slopes. You know, since you've just started making maps, this one's good for making tests and learning other things. For example, the walls have a sky texture. If you instead want a pit around the stage with a real sky, do the following:
- Make a sector surrounding the stage, then lower it and give that floor a BLACK texture.
- Make a square sector outside the map (256x256) and give it 255 brightness. This is your Skybox. Place those sky textures in the walls, ceiling and a BLACK texture on the floor of this sector.
- In this same sector, place a Skybox Viewpoint, located in Cameras and Interpolation, and give it a ZHeight of 8. Also make sure it's in the center of the Skybox.
- In the sector you made around the map, select the walls and give them all Action 9 (Line Horizon). Finally, take all of the ceilings in the map (except the Skybox's) and give them the texture F_SKY1.
- Test your map (F9).
For a pit that kills players, go see a tutorial. It's all in there.
Now then, you want to concentrate on the layout before even adding a health capsule. Try to add interesting stuff to those empty places, so that the map doesn't feel too plain. Also, when making any place, try to have more than one way into it. This is essential because DM maps are fast paced, meaning that players need routes to sneak up around opponents. Avoid dead ends for now, although I saw none.
Here's a very nice tutorial for beginners:
http://www.cutstuff.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=2512Still have questions? Feel free to ask.