Hey everyone!

A lot of things have happened over the last few weeks.
First of all, we are pleased to welcome NitraM to the FrozenSand team! Another frenchie joins the clan. :) NitraM has created several Unreal Engine 4 games over the years for and with his children and has been playing UrT for many years. He is a talented level designer, modeler and 2d artist. He has already started working on many new UrT5 assets such as a car, a fountain for Casa, a sink, various models for the Casa market as well as several props, tags and posters that you can see in the attached screenshots.

All those assets greatly help JohnnyEnglish in his current task of reworking most of the Casa building models which were not to his taste anymore. He's progressing fast and you can see the visual differences between the old and new building models in the screenshots 25 and 26.

Lizart surprised us last week with a reveal of a sidearm weapon model he has been working on for a little while: the Falcon (screenshots included). The weapon will probably not get added to the game in the near future as we are focusing on getting a public alpha ready with the weapons that are currently in-game, but it's always nice to know that there are several weapons models that we will be able to add to the game later on, 100% made by FS artists of course. In the age of AI and marketplace assets I'm very proud of the team for producing all of the assets we use for Urban Terror 5.

Neon continued the work he has started several months ago on the Genesis G9 player model. He successfully retargeted the G3 framework animations that we currently use in-game to the G9 framework. He is still avidly learning everything he can regarding animations, and he created last week his first ever animation from scratch (check it out!).

Mr.Yeah and Kipash have started dipping their toes into the Blueprints to fix some issues and do some optimizations. It's a nice help for the coders who can better focus on the game code where there's always loads of stuff to keep them busy.

Last but not least we have released a new QA build to the QA testers, comprised of many performance improvements as well as improvements to the ledge and ladder climbing done by Neon, including the new ability to climb around corners or to climb non-vertical surfaces.

Oh and Unreal Engine 5.4 is now out! We've been waiting for this release for many months and we're very excited to try it out soon. Epic has done some massive Rendering optimizations to the engine with some sample projects rendering roughly 2x faster in UE 5.4 compared to UE 5.

Hello there,

I would like to start with a little recap of your Tipeee donations from last year. In 2023, the total amount that we received in donations was exactly 3008€, of which 89% were recurring tips. You guys truly ROCK! Thanks so much for your support. Two years ago before I created this Tipeee page, the Frozensand Games company had approximately 0€ on its Paypal and bank accounts. Some of us regularly had to pay the game's monthly bills with our own money. Now thanks to your help, we've been able to pay ourselv... just... kidding. :P Thanks to your help, the infrastructure bills have not been a worry for the last 18+ months and we have more than 10 months of leeway.

A little throwback to the December news post. Following my call for sound artists, we were contacted by a couple of people. However, I forgot to mention that although we kind of desperately need talents in that area, we still have a hiring process in place and we don't just add people to the team in the blink of an eye. It might surprise or upset some people, but we do ask for some portfolio & written application, and we conduct an interview during which the whole team can freely ask questions to the applicant. Then a new hire has got to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (i.e. don't leak the game or its assets!) and a Contributor Agreement. Overall it takes a bit of time but this ensures that new hires fit the team and fit the job! Motivation to work on the game in the long run is a key factor as well. Anyways... we're still looking! :)

In the past weeks Neon has made progress again on the animations. He successfully migrated our player model from the Genesis G3 framework to the more up-to-date G9 framework (you can read more about it in the previous news post) and he's now looking into retargeting all animations to the new framework. He's also made it so 3rd person animations are also used in 1st person view. It's still a bit rough right now but this will allow us to have a perfect visual match between what we see in first person and what others see in third person, without having to tweak two sets of animations. This also means that we now see the actual player model hands and arms in first person view instead of some default military arms model that we've been using since the infancy of the urt5 project. This looks much better in my opinion (screenshots included).

While looking into all of this, Neon has discovered that a lot of our player model meshes had mesh smoothing issues. This was probably due to a bad import from external softwares where the meshes were created, which we hadn't noticed in many years. Also, some meshes had their faces not welded correctly but.. I don't really know what I'm talking about here, so I'll stop here. Just know that Neon rocks and has fixed all of this. :D

After JohnnyEnglish noticed some strange or inconsistent behavior while climbing ladders, the ladder climbing logic was improved so the player can now go around corners and under slopes on climbable surfaces (see the attached YouTube videos). More improvements should be done in that area in the coming months.

Thingley got its fair share of updates by Lizart as well with some new poles and cables created by Invis, several fences and second plan background stuff as well as some grass and trees created by JohnnyEnglish. Team work!

As for me, I've been working on fairly boring stuff lately, such as adding the ability to password-protect servers (yes, we didn't have that until now), displaying on the HUD "You killed x" or "You were killed by x", adding the ability to choose between a set of hit sounds, displaying error messages to the clients when losing connection with the server or when not being able to connect, etc. All small bits but that really need to be done before a public release can be planned.

See you next month and happy fragging!

--Barbatos

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!

--Barbatos

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!

-- Barbatos

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? :)

--Barbatos

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