Hey there all,
I've been dreaming for some time now about some ideas for new maps I could make and cool additions I could do with DoD:S. Now I just saw the Pianist and was thinking how cool it would be to have people walking around the towns in DoD, It would extremely enhance the atmosphere of the game. Well maybe it isn't practical to have them just walking around but just to seem more real. I'm sure the towns in WWII weren't totaly void of human life.
Just some things I was thinking of:
- A long line of captives that just walk past the town, perhaps on the outskirts, out of the action, but seemingly captured and being taken to POW camps and such.
- People hiding, even could be objectives. "Protect the people in the town"
- Hostages which the enemy could hide behind. (Hrm.. well of course I guess only the Axis could truly be the hostage-takers...)
- Scripted events and such...

I'm just thinking how cool it would make the maps.

Oh it'd be soo cool if on the next beach-head map if there was some sort of another battle being fought right next to you, but which you could not take part in. It'd help the 'ambient' gunfire, since theres not going to be any in DOD:S.

/droools
Long post sorry but its going to be a fun few months with Hammer
:D

For the sake of players' FPS, forget the NPC walking around idea. Just see how detailed those models are, and then imagine having 20 of them in the middle of your map. It's an absolute lag land (imagine a 24 players server with 20 NPCs to control as well). I won't even go in the gameplay aspect of things, cause a lot of people will be bothered by them.

I put Dr Breen in my map, in which he supposedly plays a French resistance leader, held captive in a basement (which allies have to secure). It's a simple ragdoll, which adds to the "being captive" idea since it collapses at the start of each round and lies luckily in a "prisoner like state".

Use your design so you can have an NPC in a remote corner so you don't need to render it from the other end of the map.

Also you may want to reskin a lot of the NPCs provided with HL2. I don't suppose there should be some with DoD Source and if you look at those we all have from HL2, only one suit fits a WWII era, it's Dr Breen.

agreed with Furyo, but it would be kinda usefull for a different kind of map... for a while now ive been thinking of making a concentration camp type map, where the allies need to attack it and rescue a bunch of Jewish prisoners. So you could put the prisoners in say, one in each baracks or something for FPS's sake. (if any wants to steal the idea go right ahead... your probobly a better mapper than me, and if its in source well... i cant even do that yet...)