Urban Terror Blogs https://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/ Urban Terror last blogs en-en Frozen Sand noreply@urbanterror.info (Frozen Sand) http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/91-community-chamber-8/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/91-community-chamber-8/ Community chamber #8 Wed, 13 Mar 2024 22:00:50 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)
This episode of Community Chamber I would like to devote to Twitch streamers that have been really busy lately. Anyone who does not have enough time to play can hop in to the stream and watch some real time Urban Terror action in many game types. Jumps , pickups , public or even some mapping. Don't believe me? See these short Twitch clips that I have found interesting!

blazefantasyy: Hello!


b0c1aM: ezeee & JsN meeting mid!


Memnon : Soli says hello!


Hampus : sup lads?


Dewar : flying shoot


blazefantasyy : Does anyone need a medic?


holyarni : Capture the Frag?


Memnon : Surprise surprise


blazefantasyy : good night Flash


holyarni : holy crepe


holyarni: ut4_ulbrace_3 Speed run (Personal Best)


Ulbens: Urban Terror need new maps!


All the Streams can be found under the Urban Terror category using this link:


See You soon Terrorists!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/79-tipeee-developer-news-august/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/79-tipeee-developer-news-august/ [Tipeee] Developer News - August 2023 Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:54:06 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!

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









]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/90-flawless-utcs-winter-2024/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/90-flawless-utcs-winter-2024/ Flawless UTCS Winter 2024 Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:38:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)
We are in the middle of new Urban Terror Championship Serie hosted by the Flawless crew. The number of clans that signed up rised up compared to the Fall 2023 edition and that's promising. Let me quickly introduce divisions with both gametypes.

Team Survivor:

Division 1 Clans

ar#MD (ModoDiablo)
asbz# (boomers-zoomers)
eureverie`
jp((+
plOP| (OverPowered)
ve.pilo (Team .pilo)
usno| (No Defiance)

Division 2 Clans

euwG** (Wasted Goats 2)
unorM`` (rMancos`)
us|RFA| (risenfromashes)
pe[Gz] (Gamer Zone)
usXiN` (XiN is Nameless)
euintel* (Intelligence)
usRapid- (Rapid Fire Team)
euYnG| (Youngsters)


Capture the Flag:

Division 1 Clans

ar#MD
asbz#
eureverie`
jp((+

Division 2 A Clans

unorM``
us|RFA|
pe[Gz]
usXiN`
uno[TFG] (The Forge)

Division 2 B Clans

euwG**
usRapid-
euYnG|
us|30+| (30+|FireStorm)

So far many matches are still about to happen and it's realy hard to tell which team will make it to play-off stage. But there is already some Twitch Stream footage to watch for those of you that have missed the LIVE action. Links below!

Match videos:

Clan euwG** vs Clan us|30+| in CTF:



Clan euwG** vs Clan usRapid- in CTF & TS:



Clan euwG** vs Clan euYnG| in TS:



Clan usRapid- vs Clan unorM``| in TS:



Clan usRapid- vs Clan euYnG| in CTF:



Clan jp((+ vs Clan asbz# in TS:



Clan usRapid- vs Clan us|30+| in CTF:



Clan euintel*| vs Clan euwG** in TS:



Clan ve.pilo vs Clan eureverie` in TS:



Hope everyone finds themselves a good match stream to watch. More to come!

Hear you soon Terrorists!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/89-community-chamber-7/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/89-community-chamber-7/ Community chamber #7 Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:35:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)

Another Community chamber entry I would like to start with the hottest website on the Urban Terror planet right now. Those who don't know it yet let me quickly introduce the story behind it. Two gamers: dearnoldus and beRocket created the interactive webpage where you can test your knowledge about maps and pickup players. With these two categories, Mystery Maps or Guess the Player, you have 5 chances to guess either the name of the arena that is being presented or in the other section the player's nickname based on the short youtube video action. Each time you have a few chances and after every wrong guess the website helps you out with hints. Each correct answer adds points to your account and there is a leader board displaying all contestants' scores. Does it sound like fun to you? Give it a try and test yourself then!

Link to the website is urt.lol To play you will need a valid discord account!

Another Urban Terror review

Recently we've been lucky with some big YouTube channels giving us free promotions. Not long time ago, we had another upload on a big channel called Levan4kGaming. It was the chance to appear to the audience that might have never heard of Urban Terror before. Thanks to this video we are reaching out to over 48K of his subscribers. If you are reading this post blog because of that thank you!
As stated by the author, it's his yearly tradition to play some Urban Terror during the Christmas season. We like it! Keep it up!

Here is the clip I am talking about:

Flawless UTCS Winter 2024 streams

If you are still hungry for some more Urban Terror action here I come. This is an upload from Twitch stream by aRandomDude on his streaming channel with the dose of his shoutcast. The game is played by the teams: usRapid- and us|30+| in Capture the Flag mode for the current Flawless UTCS Winter 2024 CTF season. Two maps match goes smoothly and hell no I won't tell you who the winner is!

Watch and see:

Farloon Urban Terror CTF Frag movie #1

To finish the post with a satisfaction I can't miss the opportunity to present you one more video of the returning player that might have rediscovered the game thanks to the reviews that I have mentioned above. beFarloon the man I am talking about has just posted a video of his 1st week of gaming after a long break. From what we can see in the video it doesn't take much to refresh memory from the past and over 7 mins long clip is full of nice plays done on the public servers. Thanks for posting this movie and I hope it won't be the last one in the series. Keep it up beFarloon

Youtube video below:


See you soon Terrorists!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/88-community-chamber-6/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/88-community-chamber-6/ Community chamber #6 Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:19:58 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Community chamber episode. I would like to start this blog post with two new/old (you decide how to call them) uploads from DisasterCasterLOL. First one is surely done for the entertaining purpose and I feel really sorry for all the guys that took part in this clip not knowing that ended up on Youtube. See for yourself what I mean:



The other video is an extended reupload on his own Youtube channel that have had its premiere over 13 years ago. The movie is edited by tarquin and you can really feel the nostalgia while watching it now. Let's rewind it:



While we are at jumping there's a new upload from meho called Cubix ft. Leo & meho. As always it is a really clean and smooth edit with nice music accompanying some good jumping skills. Good combo if you have 5 minutes to spare. Here is the video I am talking about:



The last clip I would like to share with you today comes from Blaze and is titled Fragshow 7. I wonder if you will be able to spot a bulldozer while watching it!



To wrap up all the things that have happened recently around Urban Terror it would be a shame not to mention that the 5th season of Pickup Games has ended on 11/12/2023. Let me quote the original message:

Final Standings:


If you aren't familliar with Pickups, in other words it's a game based on two teams with 5 players being picked by the captains of each team. With every game you either gain or lose ELO points that put you higher/lower in the rankings. The games are being played based on players locations/map votes and gametype picks. All that happens on a daily basis on an unofficial UrT Community Discord server. There are also tutorials on how to register and join the fun. It's a great opportunity to actually play versus some skilled players if you are tired of overcrowded public servers.

See you soon Terrorists!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/78-tipeee-developer-news-june/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/78-tipeee-developer-news-june/ [Tipeee] Developer News - June/July 2023 Wed, 03 Jan 2024 22:58:23 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!

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








]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/87-community-chamber-5/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/87-community-chamber-5/ Community chamber #5 Thu, 14 Dec 2023 16:08:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Flawless League updates there is a time for another Community Chamber episode that I have prepared for every Urban Terror fan out there.

Let me start with the recent upload from M3T4L on his channel that is: a long promised Explosion Clan video, a decade later, but better late than never, huh? clip. The story behind it is simply recovered memories from the play time and evolution of authors clan being put up together into one long movie presenting as many members and clips as it was possible. It looks like they had a good time together and now you can feel it too with the YouTube clip:



While we are in the beta 4.1 - 4.2 era there is another good clip coming from over a decade ago. An updated and extended version of the movie that took part in the UrT Movie Contests hosted by us. In case you missed it like I did all the videos are still available for watching. This particular clip has been updated by DisasterCasterLOL and to me it is even better than the original.



Continuing the chamber post I would like to present you the link shared lately on our Discord server by one of the users proving that our game is still out there on the market and still being discovered by new players each day. I am really happy that there are still up to date reviews being posted on any social platform not strictly related to Urban Terror but games in general and we are still getting some air time on the channels with a decent number of subscribers. Can we prove the author is being wrong to put Urban Terror on the Dead Games list? Use your creativity and powers in the comments section below the clip. Anyways thanks to the Rye Games channel for promoting our game and spreading a good word about our community. Here's the video I am talking about:



This wasn't the only game review that I have discovered lately and the article you are about to read comes from the real depth of internet archives. There was no better source of knowledge and data about Quake 3 & mods than the Planet Quake Platform. I can't really figure the date of this article but it's a good read and definitely the real beginnings of the Urban Terror project. There is a good chat between an Urban Terror developers and Hellchick and all that can be read up with this link: Feel the Terror!

That's it for today. Hear you soon Terrorists!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/86-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-finals/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/86-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-finals/ Flawless UTCS FALL 2023 Finals Sat, 09 Dec 2023 21:29:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)
The summary of all the other Finals that have been already played for this season is down below:

Team Survivor

Legends Bracket Final: tr banana. vs io velocity:





Masters Bracket Final: eu gucci` vs ve .pilo:



Heroes Bracket Final: eu wG** vs us XiN` 2 : 1

Capture the Flag

Masters Bracket Final: us Rapid- vs us XiN` 0 : 2

Heroes Bracket Final: us |RFA| vs us |30+|:



See you guys on Sunday!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/84-community-chamber-4/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/84-community-chamber-4/ Community chamber #4 Tue, 05 Dec 2023 11:08:52 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Urban Terror 5 footage done by one of the developers as a Halloween event in virtual version. If you haven't seen it yet check it out!



Staying in the dark themes we have a new map project waiting for some feedback on our forums called ut4_ancients. The arena is made by dasante and is oriented towards the Capture the Flag game mode.



If you want to learn more about this map feel free to visit the forum thread which contains a download link and an extended gallery.

Besides that we have a new upload from meho following the Halloween scenery with a dark and sketchy map called enigma_b1. Full clip here:



I would like to finish this episode with another retro upload on my YouTube channel dated back to 27/02/2012 and showcasing the For the Win League season 6 GlaD- vs # Tohunga CTF game. Some of the players are still around til this day. Isn't it some real dedication? No matter what you might think of the old 4.1 version this game is worth being published.



Hear you soon Terrorists...]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/82-community-chamber-3/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/82-community-chamber-3/ Community chamber #3 Sun, 26 Nov 2023 12:02:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Community Chamber I would like to start with the hot clip made by Severon called PugBot Masters Episode #3. This is his next episode of the Urban Terror Community pickup action combined with music, transitions and action flow in to the final video. If you are still wondering about trying it out don't waste more time! ;)



Also.. If you had a longer break from Urban Terror or maybe you want to catch up with its history or maybe you want to introduce it to someone new or maybe all of it at once there is no better way than sending them this video that explains a lot about the game, its history and possible future. Feel free to share it and spread the good word. The more the merrier as they say and we would love to see some new people around.



Another community news is that the map that I presented in the previous post is already being considered as a serious business in the jump community. The current world record is being held by Lagtronics. The jump video with the dose of d'n'b vibe. Perfect combo to me.



Later on the week we have had another oldschool map review from JRandomNoob on mastodon.social. The location is taken from real world and got turned into ut_crenshawb2.pk3. More details with the link.




I would like to end this blog with another jump in time back to September 15th of 2016 where we have held the UrT Movie Contest. Remember that? I don't so I have to catch up. Thanks to Disastercasterlol you can get there with 1 click away! Legendary clip that will make you remember it, as they say once you see it, it can not be unseen!



See you soon Terrorists...]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/83-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-match/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/83-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-match/ Flawless UTCS FALL 2023 Match Day Sun, 19 Nov 2023 13:31:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)
Flawless UTCS competition has reached the play-off stage. With two weeks of time to play the matchs, all involved teams have the time to play their games by the end of 27th of November, which means more interesting games are coming our way. Here are the play-off cup trees in both gametypes.

Team Survivor rankings after the group stage:

Play-off cup tree:



Capture the Flag group stage results:

Play-off cup tree:






I will try to post the game schedules once they are set in stone so keep an eye on this post or the following ones.

Current schedule:

19/11/2023 9PM CET usXiN` vs euwG** Capture the Flag
19/11/2023 10.30PM CET ar#MD vs euwG* Team Survivor Stream confirmed
20/11/2023 9.30PM CET eurummy. vs asbz# Team Survivor Stream confirmed
23/11/2023 9PM CET eurummy. vs trbanana. Capture the Flag Stream confirmed
25/11/2023 11PM CET euwG** vs us(8) Team Survivor Stream confirmed
26/11/2023 4PM CET ar#MD vs trbanana. Team Survivor Stream confirmed
Catch them at: twitch.tv/flawless_urt]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/77-community-chamber-2/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/77-community-chamber-2/ Community chamber #2 Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:07:13 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Urban Terror player and here I am again with the dose of news from the community world.

I would like to start with this new post from JRandomNoob about the map ut_Corn from the 5th of December of 2000 year.


I don't think that I've even heard about this one before. Check out the full story about this map with this mastodon.social link.

Beside that we've got a message from raffa to all Spanish players:

We welcome all of you to join our Urban Terror España channel on WhatsApp, where you could get the latest updates of all the news and events of the Urban Terror game in spanish.
Click the link to follow the Urban Terror España channel on WhatsApp:

whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va8jzAz3rZZjXMMFnr1c


Later on this week we have had a Halloween mapper's ressurection post by Valkover about his 10 years old map project being finished with the cooperation of Delirium named ut4_Sugarmill.



The forum thread with the download link can be found here: ut4_Sugarmill

And I wouldn't be myself if I didn't finish the post with some Youtube videos. This time we have a few angles of the same action made by Anger during the current Flawless UTCS FALL 2023 CTF season. Just take a look at this jump from different perspectives:

#1: Twitch CLIP
clips.twitch.tv…

#2:


#3:


Last clip for this post would be the beautiful 5 kills Ace on Tohunga by Arnica during a pickup game.



TWITCH CLIP:

twitch.tv/holyarni/clip…

See you soon Urban Terrorists...]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/81-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-match/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/81-flawless-utcs-fall-2023-match/ Flawless UTCS FALL 2023 Match Day Sat, 11 Nov 2023 22:35:00 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam)
The last day of the group games is ahead of us. The deadline for all the games for both gametypes Capture the Flag & Team Survivor is 13.11.2023. I prepared the scheduled games table for anyone who is interested in watching the streams online.

7PM CET usRapid- vs us|30+| Capture the Flag Stream confirmed
8PM CET usRapid- vs euOP| & eugucci` vs ve.pilo Team Survivor
9PM CET eurummy. vs iovelocity Capture the Flag
10PM CET eurummy. vs trbanana. Capture the Flag & ve.pilo vs iovelocity Team Survivor Stream Confirmed
11PM CET ve.pilo vs trbanana. Team Survivor Stream confirmed



All the action can be found under official Twitch account twitch.tv/flawless_urt
I hope to see you there!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/76-community-chamber/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/76-community-chamber/ Community chamber Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:39:35 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (B0ciam) Community Chamber!

The very first and I hope not the last news from the community chamber I would like to start with some Flawless UTCS Fall 2023 summary. The season has just kicked off and we have already had some interesting and tense games happening. What you might have missed if you are not a twitch.tv/flawless_urt Twitch subscriber is:









These are just examples of matches from Division 1 games that can cause some higher pulse.

Beside the competition we have had some nice jumping videos published on Youtube as well. Let me link just a few of them:

New clip from Meho



World record on cjumps2_b2 by Stupz



New race map by Stupz:



... and to end the post with something for older players, a retro upload from me with the last game of the Clanbase NationsCup XIV 2011 between Netherlands and France:

]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/75-tipeee-developer-news-may-2023/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/75-tipeee-developer-news-may-2023/ [Tipeee] Developer News - May 2023 Thu, 02 Nov 2023 21:28:31 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!
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

















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http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/74-tipeee-developer-news-april/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/74-tipeee-developer-news-april/ [Tipeee] Developer News - April 2023 Mon, 02 Oct 2023 22:21:58 +0200 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!
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



















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http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/73-tipeee-developer-news-march/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/73-tipeee-developer-news-march/ [Tipeee] Developer News - March 2023 Sat, 02 Sep 2023 23:44:20 +0200 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!
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













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http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/72-tipeee-developer-news-february/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/72-tipeee-developer-news-february/ [Tipeee] Developer News - February 2023 Sun, 13 Aug 2023 22:08:17 +0200 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos) 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!
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









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http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/71-urban-terror-has-its-first/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/71-urban-terror-has-its-first/ Urban Terror has its first ever Professional Developer! Sun, 16 Jan 2022 21:17:21 +0100 noreply@urbanterror.info (Barbatos)
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!]]>
http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/70-under-the-jade-dragon-snow/ http://www.urbanterror.info/news/blogs/70-under-the-jade-dragon-snow/ Under the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Wed, 16 Sep 2020 22:00:35 +0200 noreply@urbanterror.info (Bladekiller)
I've completed her jacket, pants and shinguards in Zbrush and have started work on her boots. This is a high res version in Zbrush with cavity maps applied as textures. They fill the indentations with shadows similar to AO maps.

This is the low res game version with the same cavity maps applied but no normal maps so it isn't smooth.

This is the RGB mask painted on the models in Zbrush. The shin guards are painted green for plastic.

The boots start as low res. Once I have the basic shape I'm after I subdivide it multiple times in Zbrush until they are over 6 million tris. Now I'm ready to start carving the high res version that will be used to make the texture, AO, cavity and normal maps.

Less than 1000 tris:

Just over 1 million tris:


Now I'm ready to start sculpting the details into these boots with over 6 million tris to play with. I'm limited by my 32 G of RAM or I would subdivide more. The nice thing about Zbrush is I can change the level of subdivision with a slider because all 7 subdivisions are always present.

Stay tuned!]]>