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Urban Terror Blogs
Barbatos's blog
[Tipeee] Developer News - August 2023
posted 1 month ago
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
Hello there,
August is usually a slow month at FrozenSand, but this year the bad weather might have helped spark some unusually high summer activity! I've included lots of screenshots and videos of the team's WIPs and experimentations.
Last month I talked about adding a new grenade - the Ice Grenade - to the game. X-dcx-x and JohnnyEnglish have created a model for this grenade that I implemented into the game, and this month JohnnyEnglish has put his hands on creating a decal material for it. The idea is to have a good amount of ice spreading all around the grenade impact point, affecting the nearby players. The way it will affect the players and the gameplay hasn't been decided quite yet, so more on that in the next news! However, the decal looks quite good now (screenshots and videos included). The issue we're having right now is that the decal doesn't work well when spawned on multiple planes, for example when the ice needs to spread both on the floor and one or multiple walls. Once we figure out how to fix this issue, I'll focus on finishing its implementation in terms of how it will affect the gameplay.
This month I also worked on the main menu, which was kind of empty until now. It's now displaying the latest website news from an API, and I'm working on also displaying the list of connected Steam friends so one can quickly invite their friends to join them. More on that later!
Talking about Steam, the Mac OSX build is now published on Steam, giving access to the OSX version of the game to the private alpha testers. I'm getting some very decent in-game performances when playing on my MacBook Pro. I can't wait to get some feedback from the QA players.
As a public alpha is getting closer, we need to work on the small bits that need to be done or fixed before going public. In that matter Neon has become our serial bug fixer lately, working very hard on fixing some small but nasty issues reported by the private alpha testers. He's also implemented a small feature that really adds to the feeling of shooting the weapons: some camera shake based on the weapon recoil. At first it was overpowered and even active when slashing the knife :D (videos included), but I then tweaked the values for all weapons. The more powerful the weapon is, the bigger camera shake it produces. I think it looks very cool!
We've released a new QA build this month, and for the first time in over a year we've added a dozen of new testers to the private alpha. We now feel confident to progressively add more people to better stress test the servers. It's also always refreshing to get some new, "outsider" opinion on the state of the game. The new testers have also found several bugs that went unnoticed for many months!
I've included several screenshots of Thingley on which Lizart keeps on doing an impressive work. It's getting more and more textures and the map really is coming alive with models and textures 100% done by the team. Speaking of Lizart, he's also done some examples of customization to the AK47 model. We intend to add customization features to the weapon and player models in the future, this is an example of what it could look like. We're not ready yet though, as there's lots of things to implement in order to deal with customization, but it should happen someday.
See you next month!
--Barbatos
[Tipeee] Developer News - June/July 2023
posted Wednesday, 03 January 2024
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
Hey everyone!
I hope your summer is going great with some holidays and sun. As for me, as a French, I can't really say that I've seen the sun too much lately, huh. :D We hadn't seen that much rain during a July in 20 years!
Anyway, in the last few weeks I've made progress on the Fragmentation Grenade that I mentioned in early May. For those who joined the tippers since then (thank you!), my goal is to implement a new grenade into the game that does less radial damage than the HE Grenade to the nearby players when exploding, but throws fragments all around itself that make players bleed when hit by them.
I've included some videos with and without the debugging stuff, where you can easily see the line traces of the fragments. My goal is to throw a random amount of fragments (with a minimum and a maximum amount) but all around the grenade so any player close to the grenade (and possibly above or under it) can be hit. The fragments currently get scattered up to 7 meters away from the grenade. When hit by a fragment, a player instantly bleeds and takes 5% of damage (per fragment).
We'll probably do some tweaking once the QA testers have a look into these new grenades, but I'm fairly happy with them right now! The third video was recorded tonight with the game running on a MacBook pro M2 btw (the first semi-public OSX video of UrT5!). :)
As I'm kind of into grenades lately, I've asked Johnny and x-dcx-x to design two new grenades, which they've done in no time. I've included some screenshots of the future Smoke Grenade and the Ice Grenade. The models themselves are now almost finished and implemented in-game. I need to work on their code and visual effects now. We'll also need to create some animations for the Ice Grenade, which will have to be armed before being thrown. It'll then spread ice around itself right when hitting the floor, slowing down players, etc. More on that soon!
Lizart is on a roll lately, and makes some great progress on Thingley with the help of Markinho among others. The map is truly starting to come alive now that it is starting to be textured. Those walls, windows and doors look really nice IMO.
JohnnyEnglish made walkthrough of two other maps that look very nice: SkyLines and Uptown.
Neon spent some time on the player selection menu (screenshot included). He created thumbnails for each player model to better visualize which player model is selected. The goal is to create a simple but effective menu for the public alpha version of the game, and improve it later (like many other things!).
Enjoy your summer!
- Barbatos
[Tipeee] Developer News - May 2023
posted Thursday, 02 November 2023
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
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
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
[Tipeee] Developer News - April 2023
posted Monday, 02 October 2023
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
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
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
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[Tipeee] Developer News - March 2023
posted Saturday, 02 September 2023
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
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
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
[Tipeee] Developer News - February 2023
posted Sunday, 13 August 2023
Information: This Developer News was originally sent 6 months ago to people supporting us on Tipeee. I write these posts with my own words, every month, mostly showing internal development screenshots/videos and explaining the latest features in the works on the upcoming Urban Terror game on Unreal Engine 5.
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
If you are willing to support the development and maintenance of Urban Terror, the posts are available on Tipeee for as low as a 1€ tip. From now on I'll also repost them here with a 6 months delay. Enjoy the read and let us know whether you like them or not!
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
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
Urban Terror has its first ever Professional Developer!
posted Sunday, 16 January 2022
Hey everyone!
There's some great news that I'd like to share with you! But first, to add some context... (there's a tl;dr at the end of the blog post!)
I've been feeling uneasy with my current full-time job as Software Developer for a little while now, and I think it really began during the first covid lockdown period that lots of us around the world had to experience in early 2020. At the time I was made aware that, as I had not a key role at the company (which is kind of true!), I needed to stop working, stay at home during the lockdown and enjoy getting paid 92% of my usual salary... doing nothing. Well, not being allowed to work for my company. For two entire months.
At first, I felt a bit disheartened, especially since most of my close colleagues were working every day. Also, in a split second all your habits and routines are gone, and you are flooded with an insane amount of free time which you hadn't prepared yourself to deal with.
We even saw this on Urban Terror, where the number of players quickly tripled during the whole lockdown period and beyond. It appears that lots of us took on the opportunity to use some of that renewed free time to dip toes into some cool old games! :)
It took me a few days, but I ended up realizing the amazing opportunity I was 'offered' and started working on a lot of various projects on which I could not make significant progress earlier due to a lack of time. Urban Terror 5 was among those projects, and those two months were one of my most active period as a developer of this game since 2011. The cherry on the cake being that... I absolutely loved it!
In the past year or so, I've thought about what happened during this lockdown and how I felt regarding my involvement in various projects. I've always wanted to spend more time on the development of UrT5, but it's never been an easy task when already working 45+ hours a week on a demanding job which already requires a lot of coding on a daily basis.
I'm therefore happy to announce that I'll be the first part-time developer to professionally work on Urban Terror 5! I'll be staying partly employed at my current company for at least a year, splitting my time 50%-50% between my new freelance work and my current employer. It is a one year experiment to see whether I like and can sustain working on the game professionally and potentially full time in the future.
Of course this will last only if losing half of my paycheck is somehow made sustainable in the long run. I'm currently fortunate enough that I don't have to worry about this in the immediate future, but I'll quickly need some other source of income to make this experiment last as long as possible.
In that regard, I have decided - with the blessing of the FrozenSand team - to try out creating a Tipeee page. Tipeee is an easy way to support your favorite projects (and developers!) with small, automatic monthly recurring tips. If you feel like supporting my work on Urban Terror 5 and making it a sustainable situation, thank you! Even a 1€ recurring tip will make a difference. I have detailed on my Tipeee page on which parts of the game I intend to work on during the next few months, check it out!
I am very excited to start this new journey on this game I've loved for over 14 years and many more to come!
Have fun
tl;dr: I'm going to professionally work part-time (50%) on the game starting this year. You can make this sustainable by supporting me on Tipeee!
There's some great news that I'd like to share with you! But first, to add some context... (there's a tl;dr at the end of the blog post!)
I've been feeling uneasy with my current full-time job as Software Developer for a little while now, and I think it really began during the first covid lockdown period that lots of us around the world had to experience in early 2020. At the time I was made aware that, as I had not a key role at the company (which is kind of true!), I needed to stop working, stay at home during the lockdown and enjoy getting paid 92% of my usual salary... doing nothing. Well, not being allowed to work for my company. For two entire months.
At first, I felt a bit disheartened, especially since most of my close colleagues were working every day. Also, in a split second all your habits and routines are gone, and you are flooded with an insane amount of free time which you hadn't prepared yourself to deal with.
We even saw this on Urban Terror, where the number of players quickly tripled during the whole lockdown period and beyond. It appears that lots of us took on the opportunity to use some of that renewed free time to dip toes into some cool old games! :)
It took me a few days, but I ended up realizing the amazing opportunity I was 'offered' and started working on a lot of various projects on which I could not make significant progress earlier due to a lack of time. Urban Terror 5 was among those projects, and those two months were one of my most active period as a developer of this game since 2011. The cherry on the cake being that... I absolutely loved it!
In the past year or so, I've thought about what happened during this lockdown and how I felt regarding my involvement in various projects. I've always wanted to spend more time on the development of UrT5, but it's never been an easy task when already working 45+ hours a week on a demanding job which already requires a lot of coding on a daily basis.
I'm therefore happy to announce that I'll be the first part-time developer to professionally work on Urban Terror 5! I'll be staying partly employed at my current company for at least a year, splitting my time 50%-50% between my new freelance work and my current employer. It is a one year experiment to see whether I like and can sustain working on the game professionally and potentially full time in the future.
Of course this will last only if losing half of my paycheck is somehow made sustainable in the long run. I'm currently fortunate enough that I don't have to worry about this in the immediate future, but I'll quickly need some other source of income to make this experiment last as long as possible.
In that regard, I have decided - with the blessing of the FrozenSand team - to try out creating a Tipeee page. Tipeee is an easy way to support your favorite projects (and developers!) with small, automatic monthly recurring tips. If you feel like supporting my work on Urban Terror 5 and making it a sustainable situation, thank you! Even a 1€ recurring tip will make a difference. I have detailed on my Tipeee page on which parts of the game I intend to work on during the next few months, check it out!
I am very excited to start this new journey on this game I've loved for over 14 years and many more to come!
Have fun
tl;dr: I'm going to professionally work part-time (50%) on the game starting this year. You can make this sustainable by supporting me on Tipeee!
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Jump Mode in Urban Terror 5!
posted Wednesday, 10 June 2020
I can't believe it's been 5 years since my last blog post!
Reading my past posts and watching the associated videos really made me realize how much we have achieved in the past few years. Urban Terror 5 is starting to look and feel better than we could have hoped back in 2014 when we scrapped the Urban Terror HD project, switched to Unreal Engine 4 and started everything from scratch.
This year we kickstarted the Private Alpha of Urban Terror 5. The feedback from testers has been overly positive so far, especially regarding movement mechanisms as well as gameplay, which are in my opinion at the core of what truly makes UrT a unique and enjoyable game. Of course, there is still a long road ahead, and testers keep us busy with a lot of bug reports and suggestions. However, opening up the game to a bunch of players outside of the development team after more than 4 years of backstage development, and getting some useful primarily feedback had a net positive effect on the overall mood and motivation of the dev team.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has given me the rare opportunity to work almost full time on Urban Terror 5 for over a month, which was a really nice, new and enjoyable experience for me. I would definitely like to work more on the game, but it is quite challenging when having a full time job and IRL occupations. I have some leads I'd like to explore to spend more time on developing the game while keeping a part-time job, but this will be for another blog post. :)
I've worked on various areas of the game in the last two months, from the usual bug fixing to more interesting stuff like implementing an in-game console, voting system, match mode features as well as... the Jump Mode!
Jumping has always had a special place in my heart, being of the things that made me stick to Urban Terror when I discovered the game back in 2008. Jump Mode also happens to be the first major feature I implemented in UrT HD in 2011 when I joined the development team. It was then ported to UrT 4.2 in its sixth release.
So here we are, Jump Mode has made its way into Urban Terror 5!
The primary focus was to port the features from UrT 4.x, such as position saving and loading, teleporting to other players, ghost players, custom stamina regeneration settings, speedometer, jump timers, etc. I also added a new feature allowing jumpers to race against their own best time (you can see such thing in the TrackMania racing game for example!).
Now that this is done, the next step will be to look into adding some other cool new features to improve this game mode. I can't say for sure that those will ever make it into the game, but I'm looking into implementing checkpoints for timed jump runs, as well as objects to collect or shoot at while jumping to get more points. I'd also like to make it possible to race against a map's best ever time.
If you have other ideas of new features to implement for this game mode, please do not hesitate to share them on the official UrT Discord or on the forums!
Here is a little video of the Jump Mode in action, on a new jump map for Urban Terror 5 called SkyLines, by JohnnyEnglish. I'm also doing some jumping on the map Uranus, which we ported from urt4 over to Urban Terror 5.
As a bonus, I recently implemented corner clipping (also called corner cutting) in Urban Terror 5. Jumpers know how cool this quake3 bug-which-became-a-feature is, so I'm glad we could port it to urt5. Alpha testers are loving it! If you don't know what corner clipping is, it allows players to pass through wall corners or thin objects without losing velocity (when done properly), instead of sliding along the wall and losing all speed. It makes for a faster gameplay when mastered! You can see some examples of corner clipping on Turnpike at the end of the video.
Please don't hesitate to let me know whether you liked this blog post or not!
Reading my past posts and watching the associated videos really made me realize how much we have achieved in the past few years. Urban Terror 5 is starting to look and feel better than we could have hoped back in 2014 when we scrapped the Urban Terror HD project, switched to Unreal Engine 4 and started everything from scratch.
This year we kickstarted the Private Alpha of Urban Terror 5. The feedback from testers has been overly positive so far, especially regarding movement mechanisms as well as gameplay, which are in my opinion at the core of what truly makes UrT a unique and enjoyable game. Of course, there is still a long road ahead, and testers keep us busy with a lot of bug reports and suggestions. However, opening up the game to a bunch of players outside of the development team after more than 4 years of backstage development, and getting some useful primarily feedback had a net positive effect on the overall mood and motivation of the dev team.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has given me the rare opportunity to work almost full time on Urban Terror 5 for over a month, which was a really nice, new and enjoyable experience for me. I would definitely like to work more on the game, but it is quite challenging when having a full time job and IRL occupations. I have some leads I'd like to explore to spend more time on developing the game while keeping a part-time job, but this will be for another blog post. :)
I've worked on various areas of the game in the last two months, from the usual bug fixing to more interesting stuff like implementing an in-game console, voting system, match mode features as well as... the Jump Mode!
Jumping has always had a special place in my heart, being of the things that made me stick to Urban Terror when I discovered the game back in 2008. Jump Mode also happens to be the first major feature I implemented in UrT HD in 2011 when I joined the development team. It was then ported to UrT 4.2 in its sixth release.
So here we are, Jump Mode has made its way into Urban Terror 5!
The primary focus was to port the features from UrT 4.x, such as position saving and loading, teleporting to other players, ghost players, custom stamina regeneration settings, speedometer, jump timers, etc. I also added a new feature allowing jumpers to race against their own best time (you can see such thing in the TrackMania racing game for example!).
Now that this is done, the next step will be to look into adding some other cool new features to improve this game mode. I can't say for sure that those will ever make it into the game, but I'm looking into implementing checkpoints for timed jump runs, as well as objects to collect or shoot at while jumping to get more points. I'd also like to make it possible to race against a map's best ever time.
If you have other ideas of new features to implement for this game mode, please do not hesitate to share them on the official UrT Discord or on the forums!
Here is a little video of the Jump Mode in action, on a new jump map for Urban Terror 5 called SkyLines, by JohnnyEnglish. I'm also doing some jumping on the map Uranus, which we ported from urt4 over to Urban Terror 5.
As a bonus, I recently implemented corner clipping (also called corner cutting) in Urban Terror 5. Jumpers know how cool this quake3 bug-which-became-a-feature is, so I'm glad we could port it to urt5. Alpha testers are loving it! If you don't know what corner clipping is, it allows players to pass through wall corners or thin objects without losing velocity (when done properly), instead of sliding along the wall and losing all speed. It makes for a faster gameplay when mastered! You can see some examples of corner clipping on Turnpike at the end of the video.
Please don't hesitate to let me know whether you liked this blog post or not!
comments: Feel free to discuss this on our forums
[WARNING] Malicious ghost clients
posted Saturday, 28 November 2015
Hi,
We've had several reports of ghost clients connecting to servers in order to fill them up, always from the same IP address.
There is a cvar which is able to prevent this kind of attack:
sv_clientsPerIp
Server admins, if you are experiencing these attacks, please set the sv_clientsPerIp cvar to a low number such as 2. It will only allow two clients from the same IP address to connect to your server at the same time.
This cvar is currently set to 0 by default, which means no restrictions at all. We will update the default value for the 4.3 final release. Bots and local clients are not affected by this cvar.
Thanks
We've had several reports of ghost clients connecting to servers in order to fill them up, always from the same IP address.
There is a cvar which is able to prevent this kind of attack:
sv_clientsPerIp
Server admins, if you are experiencing these attacks, please set the sv_clientsPerIp cvar to a low number such as 2. It will only allow two clients from the same IP address to connect to your server at the same time.
This cvar is currently set to 0 by default, which means no restrictions at all. We will update the default value for the 4.3 final release. Bots and local clients are not affected by this cvar.
Thanks
Urban Terror 5 Physics - Part 3
posted Friday, 12 June 2015
Hey!
Soooo I've been working exclusively on Urban Terror 5 physics the last few weeks and I'm now happy enough with the result to show it in a video. :)
Please admire my Movie Maker skills:
Of course there is still a lot of work to do, especially on powerslides and walljumps, but the movements are really starting to feel nice which is a good start. Our goal is still to make the movements feel like 4.x so... let's get back to work! :-)
NB: sorry, Movie Maker and YouTube destroyed the quality of my video... Do you have any free software to recommend me?
Soooo I've been working exclusively on Urban Terror 5 physics the last few weeks and I'm now happy enough with the result to show it in a video. :)
Please admire my Movie Maker skills:
Of course there is still a lot of work to do, especially on powerslides and walljumps, but the movements are really starting to feel nice which is a good start. Our goal is still to make the movements feel like 4.x so... let's get back to work! :-)
NB: sorry, Movie Maker and YouTube destroyed the quality of my video... Do you have any free software to recommend me?
comments: Feel free to discuss this on our forums
Barbatos
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