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,
The FrozenSand developers all join me in wishing you a Happy New Year! We hope that this year will be filled with joy, successes... err I mean bloody kill streaks, walljumps and taunts!
This month was a bit quiet at FrozenSand. This isn't really unusual, with the December holidays often being a time away from the screens spent traveling to see families and friends and eating and drinking probably a bit too much! However, I've got to admit that the overall team activity has been a bit lackluster this past year overall. The active team is now comprised of only about 10 people, which is quite short considering the number of skills needed to make a game and run a team (Audio, Level Design, Modeling, Texturing, Code, Animations, Community management, PR, Web dev, Infrastructure management, Team management, QA management...). From the outside it might be hard to grasp how difficult it is for everyone involved to stay motivated to work on such a big project for several years without the joy of getting feedback from the community. It is self induced of course, as we do not want to release a version - that has been expected for many years - too early. As the saying goes, you only get one shot at making a first impression! Years of hard work could be washed away in an instant due to some nasty bugs or a few missing core elements. But all this waiting has the big downside of making it hard for devs to stay motivated in the long run. We should try to remedy this in 2024, right? :)
Anyway, we're currently in dire need of sound artists, able to work on character and weapon sounds especially. For example, we currently have 6 different weapons using the same fire sound, and as you can imagine it kind of breaks the immersion. Our lack of active sound artists is currently one of the main reasons - although not the only one - for not being able to plan for a public release. If you know someone with the needed skills and motivation, please drop us an email to -email-
Another area where we've been lacking activity for over a year now is the character animations. Most of the work is done in that area but there are a lot of little things to fix and improve here and there before going public. To try and fill that void, our Swiss knife Neon has been learning character animation in the past few months, coached by FrankieV, and has made good progress in the project of upgrading our character models and animations from the DazStudio G3 framework to the G9 framework (for more information about it, don't hesitate to check the Tipeee posts of the last few months). We now have a working G9 player model with animations. Progress!
This month we've done a new QA release, mainly to revert the change from using Forward Rendering to Deferred Rendering. We've gone back to FR, as the fps drops for QA players with DR were outweighing its benefits. We've not given up on it yet as it would have a number of advantages, but we're focusing on doing more optimizations before getting back to that subject. Overall the optimizations of the last few months were greatly felt by the QA testers who reported an increase in network and fps stability, especially in combat situations.
I've focused a bit on the UI lately, especially the "Play offline", "Server browser" and "Settings" menus. I had created them very quickly several years ago so we had a working solution for QA members to set their key bindings, graphics, gameplay and audio settings, join online servers, play offline... Those menus were left mostly untouched for years, so I spent a few days giving them some love. We don't currently have a definite / cohesive UI design, so I've not made breaking changes in that area, but I've worked mainly on the functionality, like the ability in the key bindings menu to bind the ESC key (very much wanted by QA!), the ability to set up to two keys for each bind directly from the interface, or the ability to select the number of bots to add when launching an offline session.
Thanks again for your support and let's rock 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!
Hey there,
In November we've done a quite big QA release, which included lots of optimisations and improvements.
First of all, as discussed in the September post, we've focused on improving the combat experience for the players. We've added hit and kill sound volume settings, bullet flyby sounds, bullet tracing (which can also be turned off in the settings) and sounds for when there are impacts on various surfaces close to the player. Our first QA session with those changes will be this Sunday so it's too early to get extensive feedback from the QA members, but their first tests seem very promising.
The next big optimisation was done on maps. JohnnyEnglish and Neon have worked on tweaking the assets of many maps, by updating their LOD settings, replacing many physics objects with meshes, starting to make good use of Nanite that is provided with Unreal Engine 5, and making sure that the collision settings for all objects and actors were properly set. All of this led to major FPS gains on several maps without deteriorating the visuals.
The most noticeable changes were done by Neon thanks in part to the implementation of the Significance Manager of UE5. The engine has native per-actor network and visual optimisations which are mostly distance-based ; however we've found out that those optimisations were not sufficient in cases of combat situations with many players being in proximity. This resulted in big FPS drops in combat situations with 5-10 nearby players. The Significance Manager plugin allows for various actors to be prioritized relative to one another. Actors can modify their behavior on the fly based on predefined parameters. For example, actors that are not controlled by the local player, such as other characters and their weapons, items, attachments and flags do not need to have their animations update every tick locally if they're currently not in our view, even if they are right behind us or hidden by a wall. We've therefore set rules to reduce the tick interval of actors depending on their position and visibility relative to the local player instead of only their distance. These changes, when applied to most actors, improved the performances dramatically in crowded situations.
Another major improvement was to convert some costly Blueprints to C++. Blueprints are nice for quickly prototyping new concepts, game modes, UI, etc. which we did a lot in the early days of the Urban Terror 5 development, but they are much, much slower to execute than native C++. We have a lot of actors that are Blueprint-based and execute blueprint functions every tick/frame, and they all add up to a noticeable percentage of the overall game frame time. We've decided to rewrite the most costly Blueprints to C++. One of them was the blueprint handling MrSentry. Do you remember MrSentry? It's the automatic machine gun placed in spawns that shoots any enemy getting too close, and allies trying to hide the enemy flag inside of their spawn (doh!). It used to take 180us to execute this blueprint every frame. Now that I've rewritten it in C++ (and optimized the way it looks for enemies), it only takes 20us to execute, a 800% gain! This might sound like a small change, as we are talking literally about gains on micro seconds, but with dozens and dozens of blueprints those quickly add up to milliseconds, and most of those blueprints are executed every frame! I'll now focus on converting to C++ some HUD elements that are currently very costly to draw (half a millisecond per frame).
On a lighter note, Lizart has done some amazing work on a Halloween-themed Thingley with skeletons, pumpkins and some terrifying atmosphere. He's also worked on texturing the roads and the grass of Thingley, which gets more beautiful by the day.
Many thanks to all of you for your continued support! Enjoy your Xmas celebrations and see you early next year!
Flawless UTCS Spring 2024 season is about to hit the play-off phase. There are the last games to be played for the group stage and everything can change last minute yet. Lucky for you there are stream records available in case you might have missed some of the games. The detailed rankings can be found with the tables down below.
Team Survivor:
Capture the Flag:
Stream records:
((+ vs bz. in TS :
reverie` vs BOSS| in TS & CTF :
|30+| vs wG*J* in TS & CTF :
wG*T* vs |30+| in CTF :
reverie` vs MD# in TS :
((+ vs reverie` in CTF :
wG*J* vs wG*T* in TS :
reverie` vs =NC= in TS :
RAW# vs OP| in TS :
RAW# vs bz. in TS :
Play-off phase starts from 04/06/2024. Don't miss it!
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,
This month we've chatted extensively with the QA testers regarding their feeling of the game, and especially the combat situations where they felt something was still lacking. It took everyone a while to exactly get what was lacking, but we now think several small details added to the combat situations can make a big difference in how they're perceived by the players.
First, the hit feedback was not optimal: the hit sound was not loud enough and couldn't be heard properly by the local player in situations where a lot of players were shooting in close range. I've added a setting to manage the volume of the hit and kill sounds. I also intend to add the ability to choose between several hit and kill sound variants in the settings.
The second issue that was identified by the QA team was the lack of bullet feedback. Players didn't know that they were being targeted until they were actually hit. To that effect I've added bullet tracers, that show a subtle trail following the path of the bullet (videos included). I've also added back what we like to call the "whizz" sound from urt4. It's the bullet flyby sound that a player hears when a bullet flies close to them. It really adds to the sense of immediate danger. These changes will be made available to the QA team very soon. We hope that they improve the combat experience and improve the feeling in this area, which is currently a blocker for a public release - we want to make it right.
Another area I've worked on is the smoke grenade. I've noticed a few months ago a Counter Strike 2 inspired smoke grenade proof of concept made on UE5 by Christian Sparks (@hippowombat - go check his work on Twitter/X). I've contacted him a few weeks ago to get more information and he ended up sharing his PoC project under the MIT license - many thanks to him! He developed a flood fill algorithm allowing the smoke of the grenade to spread around the center point (the grenade model in our case) taking into account the environment so that the smoke goes around static objects to make it more realistic. This process also allows to interact with the smoke by shooting at it and poking a hole into it for example thanks to the smoke particles positions being recalculated frequently. The major issue is implementing this technology into the game without degrading the player experience (the all-mighty FPS!). This means doing lots of optimization which I'm currently working on. I've included a video or two showing the current WIP smoke grenade. It's far from perfect for now but I hope to show you better visuals next month!
One last thing, I've added the list of connected Steam friends to the main menu, making it easy to quickly interact with friends. An "invite" button will eventually allow players to invite their friends to a lobby session - but we're not quite there yet.
This month JohnnyEnglish and Lizart worked on making a main menu map for the game, the current one having been done very quickly several years ago. They've neatly implemented lots of different assets that were all completely done by many different FS artists over the last few years. I think it looks very good already.
Neon has been busy trying to get the new G9 player model framework to work in-game in order to allow himself and FrankieV to experiment with it. I've included a few screenshots!
JohnnyEnglish wanted me to introduce you to his new buddy named Timothy (screenshots included)... I was too scared to say no. He also felt like modeling a drone. That might be of use at some point in the future, who knows. We've got a few ideas already..
Oh, and Lizart has started modeling a new map, based on a UrT4 map... will you recognize the first few buildings? :)
Welcome back to another Community Chamber post. The last few weeks have been really interesting in terms of community creativity. We have had some very nice frag movies, jump movies and also a flashback from the past clip posted. Let's rewind some of them together!
I would like to start with quite a long upload from HeMP called The Last Dance. It's a nostalgic frag movie bringing back the 2015 year of fragging to your screen. I am sure many of you will see familiar nicks & friends in this video. So let's not wait any longer and let's dance to the rhythm of bullets.
Another blast from a more recent past would definitely be a production coming out from bzegs. I am so thankful that the era of the events from the title of this clip are over but we can still witness some heavy gaming that occurred while everyone was locked at homes. The frag movie is filled with tense clutches and nice plays from the author with the doze of summer vibes. What more can you ask for?
It's a must to mention the brilliant clips made by Arnoldus. Please forgive me but I have to post them all because I can't pick the best one to feature in this blog post. They are all great!
In the meantime Urban Terror got featured on another Youtube channel with over 21000 subscribers. The author is known for playing some old classic games in the modern times and from what you can see he realy liked our game. I hope it's not the last time he promotes Urban Terror across his audience and it could definitely help if you guys could show some support under that video. Thank you Shouneyboy <3
Another interesting upload is named UT4_Algiers_de_v01 for CS Beta 6 walkaround and it might sound odd to some of you but it looks like Urban Terror map Algiers actually inspired someone to remake it and adapt it to Counter Strike scenery. You have read it all right, don't scratch your head. Urban Terror map is getting converted in to Counter-Strike 1.6 engine. Full evidence in the clip attached.
We all know that game isn't designed only to shoot, some players find it better with jumping and here comes Ulbens with his latest community video featuring Vivaldi, Shans, stupz, quak, Gooti, Coffe and many more. Total number of 19 maps being jumped is impressive with the 4K video quality. All the jumps are close to impossible to repeat and definitely worth watching. I hope you will enjoy it!
We have now progressed to the very final stages of the current Flawless UTCS Winter 2024 season. During the last two weeks the teams have been competing in the play-off's games that will ultimately decide who wins in each category: Masters, Legends, Heroes. Let me quickly introduce the final rankings after the group stages for both game types.
Team Survivor:
Division 1:
Division 2:
Capture the Flag:
Division 1:
Division 2A:
Division 2B:
So now the current play-off cup trees looks like this:
Team Survivor:
Capture the Flag:
We are 10 Matches away from the Decoration Ceremony for the Flawless UTCS Winter 2024 season. As usual you can rewind some of the games that have already been streamed on the Flawless TWITCH channel with the help of their streaming crew.
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:
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.
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
• #MD (ModoDiablo)
• bz# (boomers-zoomers)
• reverie`
• ((+
• OP| (OverPowered)
• .pilo (Team .pilo)
• no| (No Defiance)
Division 2 Clans
• wG** (Wasted Goats 2)
• rM`` (rMancos`)
• |RFA| (risenfromashes)
• (Gamer Zone)
• XiN` (XiN is Nameless)
• intel* (Intelligence)
• Rapid- (Rapid Fire Team)
• YnG| (Youngsters)
Capture the Flag:
Division 1 Clans
• #MD
• bz#
• reverie`
• ((+
Division 2 A Clans
• rM``
• |RFA|
•
• XiN`
• (The Forge)
Division 2 B Clans
• wG**
• Rapid-
• YnG|
• |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 wG** vs Clan |30+| in CTF:
Clan wG** vs Clan Rapid- in CTF & TS:
Clan wG** vs Clan YnG| in TS:
Clan Rapid- vs Clan rM``| in TS:
Clan Rapid- vs Clan YnG| in CTF:
Clan ((+ vs Clan bz# in TS:
Clan Rapid- vs Clan |30+| in CTF:
Clan intel*| vs Clan wG** in TS:
Clan .pilo vs Clan reverie` in TS:
Hope everyone finds themselves a good match stream to watch. More to come!
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: arnoldus and Rocket 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: Rapid- and |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. Farloon 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 Farloon
Current mapcycle:
orbital_sl
kaysersberg_a2_lowres
turnpike
york_v9
algiers
pandora_b7
kingdom
pipeline_b3
abbey
holl... Posted by Bagheera 3 years ago
Welcome to Off-topic. Post about anything here, doesn't need to be UrT related. Be Nice! Posted by Asger 4 years ago
Welcome to:
- Welcoming, friendly and helpful environment for old and new Urban Terror players - Troll-free gathering place for UrT veterans and newcomers looking for some unsweaty FPS rounds - High ping allowed - Active public server and regular planned “LAN”-like events - Both teams can join the same voice channel for that nostalgic LAN feel - Solidarity and goodwill towards other UrT/gaming communities - no undermining or negativity towards other Discord servers, clans etc.
Everyone are welcome to join our Discord, Web Site & Game Servers.