Hey there!

First, some great news for the "360 No Scoper" tippers. After years of waiting I've finally got a fiber connection (1Gbps down / 600 Mbps up!) meaning that I'll now be able to properly stream test sessions of Urban Terror 5. As a reminder, you only need to tip as a "360 No Scoper" tipper once to get access to a private channel on Discord where the streams are done - until there is a public release of UrT5.

The subject of the month was about grenades! As you know UrT4 only offers two choices: HE and Smoke grenades, and there are some other types of grenades that we would like to experiment with for UrT5. The QA members suggested several ideas that we really liked, like a fragmentation grenade which would cause less damage than the HE, but would make you bleed due to the projection of many fragments and thus slowing you down until you heal yourself. This grenade would be interesting for conducting or countering rushes for example. We'll experiment with this one first, JohnnyEnglish has quickly produced and textured a model which I have started implementing into the game. More on that next month!

Another idea that could potentially fit well with the mechanisms of the game would be an icy grenade: a grenade that would create a very cold area on the floor around the impact point, massively slowing down anyone trying to walk/run on it, and also alter the spread of the weapons while shooting.
There are several other interesting ideas (impact grenade, molotov, sticky grenade...) which we will probably experiment one by one once Urban Terror 5 is released to the public. Experimenting like this for a limited time to gauge interest and get instant feedback from the community is something that we'll be able to do easily once UrT5 is out, and we're really excited about this!

Also kind of related to grenades, we didn't yet have damage knockback of the player pawns on death. They would just fall to death on themselves with no velicity whatsoever. Neon now has implemented knockback on death, and coupled with the ragdoll system it produces some very nice and spectacular deaths. Much funnier! A few videos and screenshots are included.

Neon and JohnnyEnglish had the idea this month of integrating actual clocks in-game that you can put in various places in the maps. That display the local time. In real time. So you know what time it is. Without leaving the game. Incredible. JohnnyEnglish fancied implementing many different types of clocks. It's a small and simple idea, but I really like it! :D

This month we've also done a new QA release, the first of the year (huh, yes, that sucks!). As you know we were waiting for an engine fix of the sky system that never came from Epic, so we ended up doing our own thus allowing us to release QA builds again.

Lizart and Neira are still busy producing great content for the map Thingley, which the QA testers were able to test for the first time (WIP and untextured for now). Lizart has finished working on his little tool to produce nice floor and roof tiles like explained in last month's post. A few more screenshots and videos are included this month.

Mr.Yeah has started experimenting with some Main Menu design ideas and various colours. More on that soon!

See you next month! :)

- Barbatos

Hey everyone!

Let me start by thanking you again in the name of the FrozenSand team for your continued support. Some of you have been donating monthly for over a year already, and we are extremely thankful. The donated funds allow us to keep the Urban Terror infrastructure up and running in serenity.

What's great in team dynamics is that whenever one or two key members of the team pick up their activity, they naturally motivate the others to do the same. This is what is happening at FrozenSand lately. This month the team has been on fire. Neon and FrankieV have been hard a work trying out the G9 framework for the character models and animations. They have also started experimenting with the ladder climbing animations (WIP), the end goal being to have more realistic animations without constraining the players in their movements.

Unfortunately the skybox issues experienced by many UE5 projects (especially virtual reality games and projects using forward rendering like UrT5) has still not been fixed by Epic. As we've been waiting several months for a fix now, JohnnyEnglish and Lizart have decided to create their own sky system, driven by a single HDRI file created in Blender. This works quite well and will allow us to restart doing releases to the QA team in the coming days. JohnnyEnglish has been busy updating all the maps to use the new sky system.

Neira and x-dcx-x are still hard at work creating various models used as map objects. Lizart has set up a mechanism in Blender dedicated to creating more believable tiled roofs and floors (see the attached video). This will be useful for Thingley and several other maps. The artist has to create/model a few individual tiles, and the geometry nodes mechanism does the rest of the job by using random tile instances among them. This looks much better than tiled textures and the randomness guarantees that each roof or floor is uniquely looking.

As for me, I've been looking into fixing the UrT4 Updater for the Arm64 architecture (Mac). I've developed the Updater almost 10 years ago (duh!) so the version of the Qt framework used back then is now quite outdated. Thankfully migrating to a much newer Qt version wasn't that difficult. I'm currently testing the update and trying to understand why it doesn't work quite as well on some community members' macbooks than on mine.
I've also worked on improving the in-game UrT5 console and doing some bug fixing.
On a side note I had to migrate the Urban Terror France website to a newer server this month. The website was running on a very old Python2 / Django architecture. It's now running Python 3 and a much newer version of Django after several nights of cold sweat. Migrating such a big project really is a pain in the *ss. :D

See you next month!

- Barbatos

Hi there,

This month was a bit quiet on my side so I will focus on the work of the other team members!

The Thingley project is moving forward at a very nice pace. Lizart has completed the modeling of many buildings already as shown the previous months. He has gotten the help of x-dcx-x and Markinho this month, who built a beautiful church for the map as you can see on the screenshots. Lizart also did several walkthrough videos of the current state of the map on Unreal Editor. I can't wait to watch it become alive once the textures and props get added!

Ever since we started working on Urban Terror 5, we've been using the Genesis 3 framework for the character models and animations. The framework provides base male and female characters, and we then put our own animations and character skins on top of them. The framework allows for many things such as body morphing, facial animations, organic bends and articulations.
The Genesis 3 framework is quite outdated now as Daz3D provides the version 9 of the framework nowadays which is far more advanced and provides many new functionalities. FrankieV and Neon are therefore trying out the G9 framework in a separate branch of the project to assess whether it would be worth moving the project to it.

It's important to try to stay up to date with the various frameworks and technologies we use. The goal isn't to release UrT 5 one day with many outdated stuff under the hood! We'll see over the next few weeks how this develops!

- Barbatos

Hey everyone!

First of all, thank you again for your continued support. I know I say it often but it truly has become vital to the survival of the current infrastructures supporting the game. With the everlasting increases of energy costs our monthly expenses have continually increased (for the same service!) over the months, from about 90€ per month of expenses to 106€ per month today. Your Tipeee donations are pretty much our only source of revenue nowadays and they cover our monthly expenses to host everything (website, forums, auth server, build server, test server, master server, storage and backup disks, etc.).

This month I feel a bit ashamed, huh. Last month, I was happy showing you Urban Terror 5 running fine on a MacBook Pro 2023 on the Arm64 architecture... only to notice a few days later that this wasn't really the case. I was in fact unknowingly compiling the game to run on Rosetta, which emulates the old Intel x86_64 architecture on Arm64. Well, this is still useful as we now know that the game can run on older Mac architectures without too much trouble, but this isn't really our target hardware. Our primary goal for the Mac platform is to allow players using the current-gen (2020+) of Apple laptops and desktops to run the game smoothly.

As you can imagine, switching to compiling for the Arm64 architecture did bring its fair share of compile errors and crashes, which I spent several days fixing. The team is currently running Unreal Engine 5.1.1 (latest stable release) but Epic have done some substantial fixes for Unreal Engine 5.2 (which is still in development today), so I decided to rebuild the engine on the current WIP UE 5.2 to get the latest changes. I'm now able to cook and package the game, run it with Steam, as well as launch the Unreal Editor and play from there. UE5 is still quite unstable on this platform though, and my Editor crashes several times a day, but we're getting there! I hope Epic can keep on improving the developer experience on this platform in the near future, because this MacBook seriously rocks and it's a joy to work with it.

Mr.Yeah has made some progress on 2D sketches for the new loadout menu and he's currently gathering opinion from the rest of the team. The main goal is to take from the legacy UrT what worked really great (the simplicity of the menu, the speed at which you can change your gear) and improve upon it. I quite like it so far! Once we've settled how the menu should look like and work, Mr.Yeah and Holycrap will start the implementation into UrT 5.

Neira is currently obsessed with boxes so he made quite a few variants (see the attached screenshots). They'll now be added to "common assets" that are available to be used on various maps depending on the mappers needs.
Lizart is fascinated with blinking lights so he's made all sorts of blinkers. Watch out for epileptic seizures!

Unfortunately the sky issues (see the attached screenshots on Turnpike where it's clearly visible) are still not fixed on Epic's side, they seem to be affecting many projects using forward rendering such as UrT5. We hope that those issues will be fixed very soon as JohnnyEnglish got quite depressed about them distorting his maps, which understandably isn't really motivating for him lately.

Neon is still fiddling with learning animations but we'll talk about it next month!

- Barbatos