I'm trying to load up my map after I prepared it for distro already and whenever anyone (including myself) tries to load it up outside of the Compile Tools it crashes with what I think is a DirectX error. I'm not sure if I'm just doing something wrong with preparing it but from what I hear it's not that hard to put it altogether. Here is what I did:

Compiled it all the way through on default compile settings in CoD4 1.5 copy. Then I went and found my ff and _load files and placed them in the usermaps folder under "mp_mapname." After that I got all the textures I had made and the compass and loadscreen and put them in an images folder. I created my arena file and put it in mp folder. I compressed those to a zip file and renamed the extension to iwd. So those three files are sitting in my mp_mapname folder: mp_mapname.ff, mp_mapname_load.ff, and mp_mapname.iwd.

When I boot the game up and put it in modwarfare to load the map, it just goes to a black screen and I have to CTRL-alt-dlt it to get rid of the cod4 app.

Please help a noob :(

No need for an arena file, they dont work with 1.5.

Zipped with "normal" compression? Another user on here had a similar error (i.e. a system error requiring ctrl-alt-del to end the program) and it was due to doing the .iwd as a .rar and renaming it to .zip, so maybe it's something with how you compressed it?

Compressed using Winrar, but used a zip compression under normal compression settings. And I've tried removing the whole IWD file completely and it still didn't work

Did you ever fix this?