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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?

Hey there!

It's been a long time since my last blog post about Urban Terror 5. For many months I had to use my crappy computer with 4GB of RAM and an old Core2Duo. The real-time UE4 editor was very slow to run, so was my progress... especially when you work on game physics. :)

But good news! I invested in a brand new computer. It has a i7 4790K CPU and 16GB of RAM. And trust me, it isn't too much for the very greedy UE4 editor! And although I still use my old GPU (ATI Radeon HD 5770), Urban Terror 5 and the UE4 editor both run very smoothly.

Here is a little video I recorded today to show you the progress I made during the last four weeks (set the quality to 720p 60fps):



As you can see I worked on ledge climbing, ladder climbing, player booting/kicking and head stomping. All of them are still a Work In Progress but I'm quite happy with the result for now. I'm now going to continue working on wall jumping, strafe jumping as well as powersliding.

More to come!

Hey,

I hope that you had a good time with your family and friends for Christmas and the new year!

A few days ago the information about a new version of Urban Terror 4 was leaked and we immediately started to see a lot of rumors about it, so we thought it would be better to just make it official. :)

We are currently working on a new version of UrT called Urban Terror 4.3.0.We have several aims for this release. The first one is to clean up and repack the game. 4.2 was getting messy with a lot of duplicated files and assets leading to bigger and bigger packs. A new major version is the perfect occasion for a clean up. We also decided to drop the complicated naming of the versions (4.x.xxx) for a more simple one (4.x.x) which also means that we will do releases less often because we want to take more time to QA test them.

We are also planning to release a new version of the Updater, including a lot of bug fixes and improvements compared to the one released with Urban Terror 4.2. Making an Updater / Launcher accessible to all players, having all kinds of internet connections, computers and operating systems is a really huge challenge but we believe it is worth the try.

A new game mode will be introduced: the Gun Game. We already did a public beta of this game mode last year but the development was put on hold for a while. It is now ready for a release so expect it to be available in 4.3.0!

Here is a non exhaustive list of our other plans for Urban Terror 4.3:

There isn't a precise release date for now. We don't want to repeat the mistakes of early 4.2 releases so we are going to take our time to polish this version. You can expect Urban Terror 4.3.0 to be released in the first quarter of 2015 though. :)

We are very excited about this release and we really hope that you will enjoy the new features as much as we do!

Hey everyone,

The last few weeks I've been busy setting up our development tools for Urban Terror 5 on UE4 (Github, SVN...) and watching Unreal Engine 4 tutorials and I must admit that the learning curve for coders is quite high... but it's even more challenging so I'm enjoying it so far. UE4 is really an awesome engine and everybody in Frozen Sand is impressed by its abilities.

My main issue is that I do not have a powerful enough computer to run the Unreal Editor + Visual Studio so I'm currently looking to buy a new rig. Holblin was kind enough to lend me his (super awesome) computer for about two weeks while he's on vacation so I was able to start working on the game code.

Our main focus for UrT 5 is to try replicating UrT 4.x physics and feelings, so the top priorities of the upcoming months are the walljumps, powerslides, stamina and so on.

I started working on the Stamina and the Walljumps. Here is a little video showing my progress so far. Please do not forget that everything is still in a _very_ early stage of development and will keep being updated for months.



The adjustments to fit to UrT's velocity / speed will be made later with the help of talented players and jumpers.

That's it for now! We've had a few meetings with Nounou and Kalish to design the new HUD for UrT HD and it starts being really close to what we imagined. I might drop a screenshot or two on Twitter and Facebook in the coming days.

By the way, I am looking for new talents to join the development team, particularly mappers and texture artists. If you are skilled and motivated please do not hesitate to PM me. :)

It all started in March of 2012. At this time I was actively working on Urban Terror HD on things such as improvements for the Match Mode and a new game mode called Jump Mode.
We were really worried about the health of Urban Terror and its community. We could see the number of players falling from day to day.

The community was absolutely in need for good news about HD and our negotiations with id Software to get a contract were not going anywhere. We were told for several years that we would have a (relatively) cheap contract for a multi-platform game and what we got after the long wait was a two-years-only Windows-only expensive and restrictive contract. We couldn't sign it.

We were stuck. We couldn't work on our HD engine anymore and we couldn't release new alpha versions. It's been a really hard time for the whole Frozen Sand team because we understood we were going to throw away all the work done on HD. This bad news from id Software and the decreasing amount of players on 4.1 killed the motivation of everyone in the team.

From my coder side of view I didn't want to throw away all the work done on HD and I knew we were able to port some parts of it to the version 4.x of the game. This is when the idea of doing a 4.2 version began. I suggested it to the team and everyone was ok but I had to handle doing pretty much everything code-side because there was no other active codebase developer at this time.

I had a big problem though. The source code of Urban Terror 4.1 had been lost years ago and all I got was an old-4.2 mod code that was very experimental in a lot of areas. It had to be debugged and cleaned up a bit in order to be used as a good start. It took me a while to find and fix hundreds of bugs with the help of the Quality Assurance team. Then I started adding improvements and bug fixes done on HD and at the end the changelog of 4.2.001 was quite big and I started being satisfied with it.

In May of 2012 we were close to the date of the French LAN of Urban Terror in Paris and we thought it would be great to introduce it here and let everyone test it to gather more feedback. The day of my birthday (yay!) we officially announced for the first time Urban Terror 4.2 and its changelog. I had only a few days to prepare a pack of 4.2 for the LAN with a few more last minute fixes. We were all really excited about this event.

In June I went to Paris with holblin and other volunteers from the French Community staff and we installed 4.2 on more than 80 computers for the LAN. I was in charge of the dedicated servers during the whole event (eek!) so I had to install and manage up to 8 servers.
It was a cool event despite some crappy computers on which people had FPS drops. A large majority of players were really cool and I gathered more feedback than I could ever think.

The LAN convinced me to continue the development of 4.2 after its first release, but we needed an easier way to update the game. I started working on an Updater which needed to be multi-platform as well as available for server administrators. You cannot imagine how hard it is to make it work for everyone on every platform. It was a HUGE challenge and despite it's bugs on some machines I'm still really happy with it. At the time of writing this blog entry, the Updater has been downloaded more than 500,000 times on the official website. I had to learn a new programming language and a new framework to develop the Updater so I have no regrets at all. Shout-out to Kalish for the great Urban Terror-themed design for it. By the way, it is open-source so do not hesitate to help fix bugs if you want. :)

Just before we dropped the development of HD on quake's engine, Kalish was working hard on the Authentication System. I thought it would be great to "beta test" it and asked him if I could port his code in 4.2. He was ok (it took me a while to convince him though!! :P) and he started helping me do it. We ended up working literally days and nights on it in June and July.

We all started getting really excited because the LAN event was a success and the authentication system and the Updater were working after weeks of intense work. It was going to be our first release since 2007 or 5 years! I had stopped all my other personal projects for months to get it done, I worked on it every single day for 4 months and I couldn't delay it anymore, I wanted it to be released. We wanted it to be released. This is when we made a huge mistake. We announced a release date. We should NOT have done that because it put a huge pressure on us from the community, and we were not ready. The game needed to be tested a lot more by the QA team, the authentication system needed more work and Kalish asked us to delay the release but I didn't listen. I wanted it out now. I didn't want the community to be disappointed by delaying the release.

This was a freaking mistake. The release was a disaster. There were bugs with the hitmesh that we didn't catch with the QA team as well as a huge bug in the authentication server. If I could go back in time I would slap myself for being hasty and I would postpone the release.

Anyway, I don't have a time machine (yet). :) So we had to move forward. It took Kalish one month of hard work to fix all the bugs with the authentication server. Today I still feel bad for doing this to him because he had even put aside his IRL work to fix the auth server.

Fortunately more awesome coders and artists stepped in to immensely improve 4.2 over time and I think I can now say that I'm proud of what 4.2 has become. I learned so much from my mistakes. Now I am always the guy at FS saying "no no don't release now, test it one more week!". :P I guess it taught me to be more patient and wise and it will be useful when the time of releasing Urban Terror HD will come.

There is so much more to say but I think it's enough for this blog post. Do not hesitate to tell me if you want more "behind the scenes" articles!

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Note: this is an x-post from my personal blog.

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