You see ropes lying around everywhere inside of the game. Valve made a couple of special entities to make them without any hassle, you can make awsome rope fast
Basicly it's just a sliding door but it has a piece of breakable glass kind of attached to it. They are bound together so they will move like they are one piece.
Theese kinds of doors are the ones you see at supermarkets and stuff, they will slide into the wall, or up into the ceiling if you want them to. Very easy to setup.
To make your levels even a bit attractive you WILL need some texturing skills. This video will hopefully introduce you to using the texture dialog box tools and settings.
In this video you will hopefully learn the very basics of what the tools to your left are used for. Some of them will be explained in other video tutorials a bit later on.
Hammer World Editor comes with an excellent terrain painter tool. With it you can easily adjust and create realistic looking terrain, such as hills and mountains.
Theese doors will not be affected by the physics in the game. You can set the number of degrees that the door will rotate aswell as some other nifty settings.
Nowdays making a level entirely out of brushes is impossible (if you want it to be good-looking). You are going to import models from third party 3D applications.
The reflective water is one of the best looking effects in Half-Life2, considering how easy it is to do it sholud be used whenever it fits as a decoration for your levels.
What you need to do first when starting to make levels is learn how to use brushes efficiently and manipulate them as you want. This is the build-stones of your maps.