u may not want to mayama, but its either dig those holes to open it up or move the starting points to kitty corner positions, which would really change the balance of the map, AND your proposed tunnel locations.
It didnt work a while ago and afaik the problem was that source only allows one color correction entity in multiplayer.
Can you make the way to the flag (east) a little bit brighter. Because dark areas will just force player the increase their monitor brightness. And then the rest of the map will be to bright.
I use a LCD in a well lit room, i have never had to increase my gamma or brightness to see in that area. Maybe with a CRT, but i've never had that problem.
What I want to say is that dark areas doesn't work, if the mapper use them the make it more difficult to see enemies/mines. Some players will have a big advantage it they push the brightness of their screen to maximum. Other players won't adjust the brightness, because they don't like it or their sceen can't do this. Adjusting screen brightness should not be a part of the gameplay.
I have standart brightness (black is black not grey) on my monitor and have no problem in the dark area. People that adjust the brightness are the same kind of people that change the player and mine skins to neon colored ones, that force the engine to run stuff in almost dx7 cause you can see more asf...
Yeah you really can't stop people from modifying their setup to get an advantage if they really want to.
I do slight technical advantages, but people rarely force Dx7, its simply not worth it for the fact the game looks incredibly ugly. Sure, higher brightness, HDR off, Colour Correction off, cl_detaildist 0 can all help, but they don't hit your graphics that hard. Dx7 is a major change and people generally don't use it unless they absolutely have to.
I disagree with this, I used to have to turn my gamma up on my old computer to be able to see in dark places in empires but with my new computer I havnt had a problem at all with this. Some peoples systems just arent pullin their weight around.