Thanks. The rifle and the C4 Box are not automatically "drawn" when picked up. However, you can always press h to hide the gun in your hand.
I guess the reason why it looks like Half-life-ish is because of the low poly character of the Maplet-made buildings (12-sided cylinders). But you can of course also use higher detail meshes and et a slightly more advanced look than half-life. I suggest using the huge hi-q content repositiory of the former fpsmaker asset packs, all free now, see github, fpsmaker. Also for te NPCs (they're .X, use fragmotion to convert to B3D), as the NPCs that come with this kit are really just placeholders.
Great! also, I have not look closer into it, but I presume those terrain shadows are baked?
..and speaking of which, have you not considered using TexturePosition instead of towel mesh in your csp terrain shadows? I think this will make a good start into cascaded shadow mapping.
Yes, my art path was: putting various meshes together (maplet, FLE etc.) and position lights in slimshady, then import and lightmap it in Gile[s]. Too bad I ain't got Gile[s] on my current machine.
The engine then taints the grass based on the underlaying ground color/darkness, and also dynamically darkens the NPCs (pre-determined based on their paths) and the player hand/gun (dynamically determined based on position).
