Heya,

Though I shouldn't be mapping but rather studying at the moment, I still can't keep my fingers away from Hammer and well, here comes the next project, probably the one I took most time to plan.

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/glamain.jpg


There's about thirty paper-layouts for this one, aswell as 120 photographies to work with.

The Gameplay will be very very different from the maps available at the moment and will follow DoD_Schwetzingen.

Axis own the five flags from the beginning, while the allies have 20 minutes to conquer each of them.

Right now the finished part shows the Seilbahn / ropeway and the bridge below; both the bridge and the ropeway can be used for attacks and counter-attacks, with the ropeway leading deep into the mountain on axis side.

This will be quite a heap of work...

EDIT:

New pics, the old stuff is far away from the actual state.












If you do/do not like it, just let me know.

If you have any comments or suggestions or ideas what you'd like to see implemented or can offer me some help especially concerning map models and such, please send me a PM or contact me on ICQ.

:)

-Albatros

Officially named "DoD_Edelweiss" by now.

Looks a little more original than most of the stuff I am seing lately, good concept. Keep going on it.

whoa this look awesome. reminds me of dod_cablecar. but this one is even better, keep on making this map. look pretty neat so far.

Have a look in the stuck thread for names availability

Hi,

Thanks Furyo, I think I must have had some kind of blackout not noticing that thread during the last weeks. Edelweiss seems to be free, so I'll allow myself to use it from now on :).





Improved the cars and added a second cable track - fixed blurred rock texture aswell (on some spots it was scaled three times as high as necessary).

Cheers & thanks,

Albatros

this reminds me of a map in 007:Nightfire where there were cable cars to get across and shoot each other.

its looking good.

Looking good, keep it up!!!

Any chance of a quick explaination of the gameplay? I've having trouble figuring out how it's all going to work :o



Still looks fun, go hard!

It looks cool !!

I'm curious as to gameplay as well.

:)

Hi there,

heh, sure. I'll elaborate a bit on the gameplay concept.

I must admit it differs quite a lot from those maps I've played until today in DoD:Source.

Do you remember DoD_Schwetz(ingen), which came I think with DoD beta 2.0?

There were two sides of a city, connected by a bridge and river in the middle, which was one of the 5 capture points.

The right side of the map contained the other 4 flags, while the left side was only a large spawn for the allies and couldn't be accessed by axis.

At the map start, all five flags belonged to axis and could only be captured _once_ by the allies without the chance of recapturing them.

There was a time limit of 20 minutes aswell for the map to be capped out.

I'll use just a layout similar to this on DoD_Edelweiss.

The part you can see on the left side of the bridge will be very close to the allied spawn, the bridge in the middle will be the first flag so to speak.

The tunnels on the right side lead through the mountain into the train station of a small mountain town on the ground level of the map, while on top of it, the ropeway continues through the mountain and ends in the second storey of the train station.

Basically it works like the normal Old-DoD-Schwetz, except for the tactical options offered by the ropeway.

Also I could imagine that fighting each other in a kind of vertical combat with several levels could be rather cool... 8]




Experimenting a bit with lighting styles...

Looks very promising!! :crown:

when and where will we be able to download it?

Hi there!

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edel0.jpg

Can't promise anything, but with a bit of luck it'll be done within december. Though it's likely to take longer since I have yet to figure out some more complicated stuff.



















I'll hurry though... I'm looking forward to play it actually ^^.

Cheers,

Albatros

It looks grand and moody! I love the shot with the red sun behind the cablecars, I hope you keep that lighting scheme.

Looks cool !! no pun intended !

Something odd is the lights you are using for the interiors, the lightbulbs, they are casting a "spotlight" type beam which they wouldn't do. Change the light model to something like this (minus the wall mount):

http://www.dutchphotoday.nl/images/20060801202305_piet_img_1454.jpg

The exterior mountain surface looks better with the rock texture rather than snow covered texture. (from your first pics)

http://www.albatros44.de/glac/glamain.jpg


Other than that nice looking and original.

:)

looks pretty damn cool !

:]

@Noodle Head:

Well I'm not certain yet, as far as the lighting is concerned there are just so many beautiful & splendid settings for alpine scenarios that choosing one really becomes a torture :D.

Right now I'm experimenting with falling snow which would require a greyish ambience.







! Just-a-test !

;)

@ultranew_b: the problem with the rock texture was the contrast between the normally textured part and the 3d-skybox one.

It's just been looking way too repetetive and therefore the snow texture beats it on the long run (though I liked the looks of the rock version better, too :( ).

Other advantages are the logical compatibility of snowy rocks with snowy ambience... hey, maybe I'll just make a blend texture from the rocks and snow. Think that could look nice?

Oh and thanks for pointing out that part with the lamp models, I intended to change to light_spots and change them models to the prisom-lamp thingeys (which I obviously forgot :D).

I'm taking a break right now but I'll definately finish this one quite soon.

Cheers & thanks,

Alb

Forget about the other stuff... new ambience.

I saw some incredibly impressive stuff today and therefore knew it was time for me to really start using at least some of the source-goodies...


http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edhdrb1.jpg













... really hoping for some comments on whatever comes to your minds so I can finish this thing soon.

very impressive! cant wait to try it out

Two questions Alba:

- What's the size?
- When is play testing or has it alrady been tested?

Hi guys,

There hasn't been a playtest yet.

Right now, the size is at 15 Mbytes unzipped, 7 Mb zipped.

Don't ask me why it is that small, I guess it's due to the fact that I've been using a lot of standard materials and such on this one.

I'm working on it 24/7 but there's still a lot to do!

Cheers,

Albatros

nice to see something totally neew- screens loook awesome
hows the FPS?

Hi,

There should be an indicator in the lower right corner of each picture.

Right now I guess I'm at about 20% more fps than on Anzio or Argentan.

Cheers,

Albatros

As I said, I'm working on it quite a lot right now.

Here's a bit of an update.

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edupdb.jpg




For the first time: a rudimentary overview. Allies will start on the left side, while the axis spawn is located in two of the buildings on the right. Ropeway and Railway are running on two seperate levels between the two spawns.















:)

This looks really good !!!

One small thing I noticed. The tunnel, the light spots need to be moved up to the level of the lamps (there is a gap which looks odd).

Pic #8 - This room looks too empty, add some rail cars?


Really looking forward to this one! Very original work!

:)

looks stunning! :)

i love all your stuff Alba, and this is no exception :D

:D Looks great.

Hey guys :)

@ultranew_b:

Thanks for the info :), I've been fixing some of those spotlights, hopefully all.

Also I changed some textures and decided to redo some of the brushwork.

Last but not least I've implemented a system of advanving spawns for the allies following the .rfm from mardymouse.co.uk and included all the flags now. Edelweiss will only use four of them, since allies will only have about 25 minutes to cap them all.

Text messages announce the beginning of the attack aswell as the capture of the middleflag (which triggers the spawn advancing).

If somebody could arrange a playtest, I'd be very thankful :).

Right now the newest version is compiling, if everything prooves to work I'll load it on my ftp.

Cheers,

Albatros

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edalpha1.jpg

If you compile and have it ready later I can have it up on the server later tonight! (Early Morning for you?)

The design is beautiful and a welcome addition to the played out grid style urban maps

For the most part it is visually impressive but there are a few areas that are under detailed and bland, hope it plays as well as it looks

very hot map, reminds me of the dod map dod_festung or escape err forgot the name of that one map, where there was us prisoners escaping by cablecar

Hi Formologic,

sounds sweet! Thank you :)

I'll send you a pm with the download link in it (last version didn't satisfy me yet, so I'll need one or two more compiles).

Yeah, some spots still need more detail, that's true. We're working on that... ;-)

Yeah this looks like a definate add to the server when its ready.. Looks very promising.

http://www.albatros44.de/edprev1.jpg

Hey guys,

after fixing quite some stuff during the last week and tweaking the map here and there, I might release a first beta version tomorrow.

Some people have been testing it successfully so far.

Maybe Formologic's feedback will arrive in time, that would be bestest! 8]

The size of the Map is at 12 MB now (in a simple .zip), so I guess a bzip2-version should be about 10 MB in size and therefore rather nice for public playing.

I'll give a holler as soon as it's ready.

Cheers & thanks for everybody's help,

Albatros

cant wait :D

awesome-looking map -- any servers hosting this?
DoD-F playtest?

question I have on the spotlights -- neat effect, but is there any big tax on the system to use these? if so, would it bog down when you have a full server?

Originally posted by Dradz
question I have on the spotlights -- neat effect, but is there any big tax on the system to use these? if so, would it bog down when you have a full server?

As long as he's turned they Dynamic Light flag off its fine. I'm more worried about the two Tigers there, thats like 20k polies if your nearby.

Hey guys,

Heh, those lights... well, at first I had forgotten to set the "no dynamic light" flag... you can imagine the expression of my face when I was first testing it at 35 fps without any further performance killing stuff. :D

Now that they are not dynamic any longer, the costs are close to zero.

Much worse are the static props like the Tiger tanks. I'm still running a good deal above dod_kalt for example concerning the average fps, but I'd nonetheless like to cut down on them a bit.

Does anybody know the polycount for the Sdkfz 222 or Flak 38?

Cheers & thanks in advance,

Albatros

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edba1.jpg




P.S.:

I'll have another playtest version available in 90 minutes.

If anybody wants to conduct a playtest, please let me know!

Yesterday's playtest with the OFAB guys was amazing, they're a great bunch of guys and I've spent a couple of hours today working on a little surprise as a gift :D.

those lights...are just flat out amazing im my opinion, beautiful :D

B1 is released. :)

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edb1.jpg

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edb2.jpg

http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/edb4.jpg


Hoping to get much feedback on what to change etc. etc. ;)

Cheers,

Til / Albatros

awesome!! speechless!
will players be able to operate the cable car?

Just check it out yourself :) it's been released a few hours ago :)!

Players can't operate each cable car on it's own, but can start the ropeway manually and ride in each cars (and deploy MGs in them :D).

Cheerio,

Albatros

Where's the download? Who's holding out on the BSP files lol?

Originally posted by TowJumper
Where's the download? Who's holding out on the BSP files lol?
you can find it in the release-section. the released version of dod_glaciers is called dod_edelweiss.

http://www.dayofdefeat.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70646

Hi TowJumper,

you can find the download at http://www.albatros44.de/edelweiss/dod_edelweiss_s2.zip

Or in the "releases"-subforums.

S2 is the Standard-CTF-style in a bugfixed version. :)

Cheers,

Albatros

Thanks I'm really looking forward to this map! Will add it on CHURCH of NORRIS servers today.