the map itself is not supposed to be spectacular the textures are what i am concerned about at the moment. i am working on more Black Mesa Textures. i wish i could just take them directly from the game files but their in a Valve format (VMT and VTF) when i finish the map it will look a whole lot more awesome.

> i wish i could just take them directly from the game files but their in a Valve format (VMT and VTF)

Google "vtfedit". It should open texture files.
(Valve distributes the source to the Source engine with the SDK, so just about everything, including file formats, is pretty well documented.)
But you're just going to use those as visual reference, right?

Bit of advice my friend, when you are more concerned with making textures than you are the map (this of course being not too big a deal though) If you are in the middle or just working on textures, don't post a map using these textures and trying to concern yourself with two projects at once, work on the textures, then add them to a map (When you can focus on both gameplay (being the main thing here) and eye candy)Many people on here worry about eye candy when people like me worry about gameplay.

long story short, pick one project at a time, and then neither one of them will suffer any distraction because of the other. And since you are mostly worried about the textures, release the textures after you finish all or most of them, and then make your map just after.

Perhaps read the documentation: http://sauerbraten.org/docs/editref.html

yes i used the screen shots as a texture reference because i only have the PORTAL game. i couldn't figure out how to lessen the effect of the normality map so i simply lessened the alpha, which seemed to work.