Hey,

it has been quite a while since I've made my last posts here, but I had my reasons. One of them - maybe the most time-consuming one - has been this project called DoD_SovietS.

It's taken almost two months of daily work (or 1100 hours) so far and it's now on the finishing line.

My fellas from Girona, clan SovietS (www.sovietsclan.com ), asked me to make a kind of "special and exclusive" map for them so they'll probably have some more visitors on their servers. Thus I hope you'll understand that all beta testing should happen through SovietS and on their servers until a final version is done.

Of course I can't ask of anyone not to run the beta on their servers, but maybe those who are reading this :) will have the patience to wait a couple of weeks for the final version.

Would be a sign of goodwill towards clan SovietS and myself ;p.

Anyway........... so here it is.

The setting:

- A town in the east in 1945. There's a mining district with a small railway relais station, steel works, some riverside stuff and a downtown quarter. Most of the buildings are following art nouveau / jugendstil references, some are actually existing.

There are 5 flags - 4 x 1-man caps, one 2-men-cap.

Both teams spawn on seperate maps; there are two extra maps surrounding the battle map, so the US players spawn either in platoon alpha or platoon bravo (Zug Habicht or Zug Sperber for the Wehrmacht, respectively).

This will bring the players closer to the first or second flag and therefore reduce the time spent running through the map... should be fine for those who like instant action with 12 or less players on a map.

There will be mortars, artillery pieces and maybe airstrikes available for both sides aswell as some background music, special sound files (Doc Orange offered me help on that, muchas gracias in advance :) ) annnnnd - in case I'll ever get that working - the Soviet Player & Weapon Skin Pack from Ivan-Rus.

PICTURES:

Very nice buildings... snow looks a bit out of place... Will take a look.

http://www.albatros44.de/soviets/sovp1.jpg

http://www.albatros44.de/soviets/sovp2.jpg

http://www.albatros44.de/soviets/sovp3.jpg

Man, that looks brilliant. I love the setting.

Fantastic work, can't wait to see that done ;D

Very industrial looking. Quite nice. Looking forward to playing this.

I have a hard time believing the texture on the roofs, the snow is just sitting there perfectly on a >50 degree slope. Otherwise, it looks awesome.

You can simulate mounds of snow on the roofs with displacements.

Heya,

Sure, I could use displacements there. The current texture is just a placeholder. Many of those roofs serve as vis-blocks though (which gets a respectable meaning with more than 125000 texture faces involved :P).

Thanks for the feedback :)

Is there a story behind the bucket of blood? Very curious.

Heh,

it's paint :p.

In the final months of the war it was very popular to paint various paroles onto the walls and that poor fella apparently had a bad timing when doing so. :)

This is, with no exaggeration, the best looking Source map I've ever seen.

Excellent work.

very nice, we have the idea of making a video-trailer(uploaded to youtube or videos google) of the map when albatros finished the first beta, to make publicity of it ;)

we have a lot of people waitting for the beta1 to play it xD

Excellent as ever Albatross.

This is looking real nice.
But, what's more important... it has a great atmosphere. I hope the atmosphere will remain when actual in the game, but it really feels alive...

Awesome map

H.

It is hard to pull off a good industrial cirt in Source, so good job and keep working on it! I love the skyline with the onion dome building which is nice because i have never seen a dod map with a onion dome, which makes yours very original!

Thanks for the feedback once again.









Getting close to finishing it... finally. :)

That looks a lot better than the original screenies, in which the entire rooftops really felt like placeholders.

Your use of Spine's textures is quite excellent, and that's always been your trademark, however I would advise you against using so many of them, for your bsp size will just go up exponentially, killing any chance of ingame download.

How is the performance on this map?

waou!!! very nice work buddy!!

same question as furyo... really wondering what performance and fps you get on your map....???

those outside areas are huge? how do you manage with it...?

I'm really interested in your tips on that? do you use area portal? or is it one big outside place?


please tell us? :D

Hey Furyo, how are you :)

Spine's textures are excellent, that's the worst thing about them because yeah, the filesize always gets bigger than I'd like it to be. Pretty exhausting to keep a balance of visuals and size, but until now I'm still in the "yellow" zone.

By the way - on those pictures, only the rubble texture & that "Volksgasmaske" decal are from Spine's; had to do the rest on my own (ruin/church/palazzo/skyline textures, commercial/propaganda overlays) that and the fact that I grew fond of normalmaps are the reasons why it's taking up *quite* a lot of time... :)

Concerning performance... now, I think it's similar to that of DoD_Nightingale, in some places better, on the average maybe a tiny bit lower. There is some optimization potential I haven't touched yet in it though, so I'm confident I can get it to run quite acceptably (benefits from my low-range system).

Cheers,

Albatros

P.S.:

Hehe, hey Yoda. Yes, I'm using areaportals, and the rest of the trick is a very stringent vis-concept, to-the-edge far-z-clipping and model fade outs (giving most high poly models an individual fade-out range here which is a hell of a lot of work but not all ineffective). Also, never forget about the common methods aka using func_details, limiting prop_physics, not using dynamic lights and making intensive use of the nodraw-texture.

regards :)

gj ;)

Hehe, hey Yoda. Yes, I'm using areaportals, and the rest of the trick is a very stringent vis-concept, to-the-edge far-z-clipping and model fade outs (giving most high poly models an individual fade-out range here which is a hell of a lot of work but not all ineffective). Also, never forget about the common methods aka using func_details, limiting prop_physics, not using dynamic lights and making intensive use of the nodraw-texture.

humm.. I'm almost disapointed looool I really thought you were going to tell me something I got passed without seeing and that would help me optimising my dod_tarmac map!!!: I'm using the best I can all of the tips you listed there.. spent hours on giving individual fading distances to props.. using far z clip and fog, using no draw at the best and area portal to seal every building... skybrushs at the top of buildings and areaportal to close outside areas... but still.....I'm not getting it all right!

it's sooooo hard to to get it right from small corridors to large outside areas... I'm struggling on this parts.... sewers and inside buildings are perfect (FPS rocketting at more than 110fps in every building) but some parts of my map.. outside areas get down to a horrible 20fps.. and when I use mat_wireframe 1 in the console I can see why = loads of props are drawn way out of players sight, but moving areaportals and adding hints doesn't solve the problem...... snif!

thought you could help me.... looool :D

I'm very keen on learning "how-to-deal-with-those-big-outside-areas" so if yourok to share your knowhow on that pleeeease tell meeeeee lol :D

start getting prepared xD

The premier of dod_soviets Available Tonight!! (trailer :P) Albatros will post it, uploaded to youtube or videosgoogle, with a video complete download link in wmv.

it's sooooo hard to to get it right from small corridors to large outside areas... I'm struggling on this parts.... sewers and inside buildings are perfect (FPS rocketting at more than 110fps in every building) but some parts of my map.. outside areas get down to a horrible 20fps.. and when I use mat_wireframe 1 in the console I can see why = loads of props are drawn way out of players sight, but moving areaportals and adding hints doesn't solve the problem...... snif!

thought you could help me.... looool :D

I'm very keen on learning "how-to-deal-with-those-big-outside-areas" so if yourok to share your knowhow on that pleeeease tell meeeeee lol :D

Have you tried occluders?

dod_soviets Premiere

Trailer of the Map is Available HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ina-TlkUE4E) 4min 24 secs

uploaded to youtube.

Download Version in WMV HERE (http://www.sovietsclan.com/roke1/dodsovietsbyroke.wmv) (92MB)

Special thanks to Albatros xD, soviets and all the "extras" who participate in the Video

orgasmic..

orgasmic, probably the better definition i have heard xD

hi, is the soviet characters embedded in the bsp? as in they will use the code if you have them?

orgasmic, probably the better definition i have heard xD

But it is!

213, I really hope Albatros doesn't embed any character or weapons models or sounds. That would bloat up the map file size to unreasonable amounts.

Looks Good. Do you have T-34 Tanks or any Russian tanks being worked on or are you going to use the Shermans in your maps?

at the moment the soviets skins are not included in bsp, they will be added in later beta updates, but insteed of the amount of the map, with Fast DL in the server the map download tooks me only less than 2 minutes the day we made the trailer

The Shermans will be alright.

The Red Army used plenty of them during the war.

You can get some nice images from the google picture search (red army sherman should do the trick).

Lend Lease tanks (http://www.theeasternfront.co.uk/Vehicles/russian/lendleasetanks.htm)

The above link will take you to a page on Allied tanks used by the Soviets.
For those too tired to google :D

Hello.
I am H@@nSoLo, to leader of SovietS Clan.

One first version of evaluation and test of Dod_SovietS, available exists for all those players and clans that wish to see, to prove and to play in the map, as well as to help in its final development.

The map is installed in server: IP:89.17.204.52:27020, prote'ge' by means of password.

It is interest of Albatros and SovietS to be able to make many test to leave the map in perfect conditions before putting it in publics servants.

To send mail to haansolo@sovietsclan.com to obtain pasword.

A warm greeting to all.
H@@nSoLo, SovietS Clan

lol Haansolo "ese ingles de Puerto Rico xD" ajajajaj

you must studied english in the school my friend xDD

servants=sirvientes --> es "servers" xD

as usado un traductor a que si jaja, tonto laba, la proxima te lo traduzco yo ansioso :P

Sry for haansolos English, he is spanish and never studied xD, he uses a translator to write this xD

Sry for haansolos English, he is spanish and never studied xD, he uses a translator to write this xD


Not all the spanish are like Haansolos :D , I use the translator in the correct way xD


Good map? NO! BEAUTIFUL......