Hi All,

'Alpine way' is a 16x16 map for 1v1 play. The main feature is a road connecting the two teams, on which vehicles can travel 30% faster.

This is the first Spring map I've released, so I'm not quite sure I've got the game-play elements right (steepness, metal placement, etc.) Please let me know what you think.

Download link: http://spring.jobjol.nl/show_file.php?id=1381 [28Mb]

Tools used:

L3DT Pro (v2.5.4.16) and 7-zip.

Screenshots:

Pretty badass (kinda figures, since you made L3DT). Dunno about the layout, game-wise (the asymmetrical lake layouts, especially), but that's an automated road there, isn't it? Neat. This kind of thing is why everybody should pony up some dough, give ya a little love for making such a nice tool.

Only crits I can give is that it needs some hand-paint for final polish- stuff like drainage stains around the base of the cliffs, a little more variation on textures for the grasses, stuff like that.

Feels pretty good though, and it'd be cool as heck, with some World Builder objects to make it lively. Meh, makes me want to build more buildings and stuff for that, just so that I could do it, but I have a punch-list to finish first.

I don't suppose you'd make me an awesome heightmap / paint-up for a volcanic wasteland with a giant central volcano, with some crude roadways through seas of hardened basalt and lava lakes to join nice flat plateaus on the corners, for the final World Builder demo map? I'd be more than happy to detail it.

Sorry to be presumptuous, but I've been so overwhelmed with getting P.U.R.E. finally done that I haven't been able to dig up the time this week, probably won't next week either, and I think it'd be an interesting challenge for L3DT to try and depict that kind of terrain. Was going to do it mainly by hand, but thought I'd ask- I really think your cliff algo might be able to pull it off, although I'm still wanting to put RogerN's new tool through its paces, mind ye.

typemaps with high increases for only vehicles means that KBOTS move slower on this map.

Typemaps unless used properly are

I like it, Aaron!

could you make a duo version? (mirror everything on the left end?) would be great for nota team battles.

I just played around with it for a few minutes. My thoughts:

* The visuals are great, and the scale is just about right.

* Excellent arrangement of trees IMO

* Not enough metal, not even for 1v1. In fact, I'd argue that the map is almost unplayable with the amount of metal is currently has. At the minimum I would double or triple the metal content - other mappers may disagree. Since there are a small number of metal spots, I would add more spots rather than just making the current spots more valuable.

* I think it needs more flat areas (this is somewhat subjective, though). Most of the map is too steep for vehicles, and it's very difficult to tell which areas are reachable and which aren't. Even when pressing F2 to view slope tolerances, it's still hard to judge accessibility in areas.

K-bots can go almost anywhere, so the terrain makes for an excellent k-bot battleground.

EDIT: Take my advice with a grain of salt. Only one of my maps has ever gotten significant play time :)

I would disagree about making more metal spots.
You can make them giv emore metal but you dont have to add more metal spots.
We have tons of maps with a lot of metal spots.

Can someone post a screenie of the metal map?

Is that a solid archive? Loads rather slow, on a E8400...

btw, metal is plenty, mex radius is huge and a there's a lot of trace metal in the metalmap, so mexes give about +2, no matter where you put them.

Whoops... I didn't notice that. Yes, all mexes give +1.9 whether they're on a metal spot or not. I'm sure that wasn't intended, and it certainly wasn't apparent looking at the metal map.

Metal map screen shot:



As you can see, there are only 15 metal spots on the map. With +1.9 per spot (assuming that was the intent, rather than +1.9 everywhere on the map) that's less than +30 metal to be divided among all players. I didn't think that was enough.

Would probably be ok for 1v1....

Yeah, not all maps have to have same metal. It's part of what gives the game variety, low and high metal games play quite differently.

>_>

that should be more than enough for the stated purpose of 1v1. Ever play on barren?

Can you say converter eco?

That's not a great comparison for three reasons:
- Even Barren has more metal than this map
- This map is 400 percent larger than Barren
- Barren has more metal spots (24 vs. 15)

I suppose that there are a few people who wouldn't mind playing 1v1 under such conditions.

Fog is annoying.

looks beautiful but gameplay not so much

Hi Guys,

Thanks a lot for the great feedback! I'll tweak the metal values and add a few more patches, and post back here when it's uploaded (as v2).

Cheerio,
Aaron.

in the smd for fog the higher the better 0.07 is no fog or sumthing

Hi Guys,

I apologise for the delay. I've uploaded v2 of 'Alpine way' to:

http://spring.jobjol.nl/show_file.php?id=1420

This version includes substantially more metal and some new roads.

Cheerio,
Aaron.