So I whipped up some terrain and made a base for my map. The idea is to have dirt roads combined with check points, houses, and various places from FarCry2 like "Mike's Bar". Including some shanty houses on top of cliffs, basically all the things you would expect to see in FarCry2.
The map vegetation is trying to be mostly Savannah, with an Oasis in the middle.
Here is what I have done with it so far:
The biggest issue here, is source engine's limitations, its extremely hard to get good vegetation. I tried my best to make this Oasis look decent, I even manually placed the grass all around it, and optimized the grass by letting it fade out when get about 4000 away from it. It took about 5 hours of work.
I personally say it's not too bad, speaking the map is meant to have a good overall look, its not meant to be overly scenic, since the map is huge and will have some RP elements in it. The map needs to at least look decent though, I want it to make you feel like you in a FarCry2 like world.
The major things that down the overall quality, is the fact that you can't have more then 64k detail props, so my thick Savannah grass just wasn't possible on my displacements. Blend textures are limited to only 2 blends which is a bit of a bummer. By far the most annoying thing, is how restrictive the displacement details are! I'd say the Detail.vbsp is the most annoying thing in the world for some GMod mappers.
If you have any suggestions, tips, or reminders I would appreciate it, its been a long time since I made a map, and its been never since I have tried to make one based around nature while huge enough for RP elements.
P.S. If you have never played FarCry2, here is an example image of the map's general style:
