Urban Terror For Quake 3 Revealed

nukem996 writes "The Silicon Ice development team has just released Urban Terror 3.0 Beta, a great realistic team-based urban warfare Quake III total conversion." The 322mb download includes "...completely new code for lag compensation, hit detection, physics... and a fully integrated UI", and there are multiple download mirrors listed on the official site, plus a BitTorrent link from Filerush.com - good to see there's still some quality Quake III mods, even after Epic's financial inducements to mod Unreal Tournament instead.

Comments

post, damn it

[Anonymous Coward]

How am I supposed to moderate when there are no posts?

The army of modders

[The Munger]

It's amazing just how much life can be added to a game by making it mod-friendly. A game like Quake 3, after a few years like this can still have enough wind to carry a following in add-ons.

I guess it doesn't always work though. Consider games like Freedom Force. FF had a nice Python interface, and yet I didn't see a single mod out there for it (not that I looked especially hard).

It's good to see independent developers getting started too. I haven't played this latest release, but I remember downloading and playing a bit of this a while ago. It was really quite polished, even back then. If these guys want to get into the industry, it's a good way to go about it.

Re:The army of modders

[Synic]

Freedom Force didn't exactly have the same amount of press coverage and hype pre-launch and post-launch that Quake III did. Irrational also didn't have the benefit of being a legendary (or infamous) developer (however deserving you think that is).

Lesson? Technology doesn't spell success. My bet is that Doom III will be shown up by Quake IV (please prove me wrong).

Re:The army of modders

[btlzu2]

No proof here, but I thought the Quake line was terminated with Quake III. I don't have the time to research right now, but does anyone else remember hearing/reading that? If there is going to be a Quake IV, I'm happy.

Re:The army of modders

[Techiegeeks]

There's plenty of mods for Freedom Force. Check out Freedommods.com. You can play as the X-Men, Spiderman and plenty of other superhereos.

Re:The army of modders

[paradesign]

I thought that Q4 was basicly a Doom3 mod itself. Its going to use the D3 engine. So i dont think therell be any 'showing up', since Q4 wouldnt exist without D3.

Re:The army of modders

[Synic]

No, I mean that Raven Software will be a better GAME developer than id Software could ever be (in other words, they will use the Doom3 engine to its full potential and then extend it to do things that it wasn't originally intended to do-- much like what they did with the Heretic series, Soldier of Fortune series, and Jedi Knight 2) -- Carmack is pretty good at engine writing (and he has a tendency to push hardware developers in good directions) so I have no real beef with him per-say, but their games are ultimately as shallow and base as the company name suggests.

Re:The army of modders

[executebusiness.com]

"then extend it to do things that it wasn't originally intended to do"

Your arms weren't meant to breathe, themselves. Does that mean they should sprout lungs and try?

The game design quandry is that creativity is best spent on the story. Set decoration is secondary to gameplay, but games aren't interesting if they are unbeliveable.

What I'm hoping is that Raven will do things that the Doom 3 engine was intended to do, but also do them better than Id Software.

I think we're past the gimmie-gimicks.

Re:The army of modders

[Synic]

The Quake 2 engine was not intended to be for third person perspective games. Hence, they made it do quite well (ie all new camera code) what it wasn't originally made for.

No need to be a smart ass.

Re:The army of modders

[dolo666]

What a silly thought. That changing from first person view to third would be some kind of feat.

How you show your ignorance!

Fun game...

[FauxReal]

I used to play this all the time about a year and a half ago. It's on a slightly different vibe than Counterstrike... I suppose its more cartoony but still somewhat realistic. I remember enjoying the sniper maps a lot more than on Counterstrike. I kinda grew out of it once I discovered Action for Half-Life. I'll probably take this one out for a spin though.

Cross platforms also impress me...

[antdude]

Also, the cross platform support for these incredible mods are awesome too. I was able to play Q3A mods in Linux and MacOS X beside Windows. :)

I remember when Action Quake2 was popular, Linux port wasn't very good. For example, the skin filenames were different because Windows didn't care about case sensitivity, but Linux's port did. It was frustrating during the first few months.

Bidding system for weapons?

[Dot Com Drew]

Do you have to bid or pay for weapons like in other games? I took a look at the site and didn't see anything mentioned about that. Maybe I just overlooked something.

I really liked that added dynamic to CS. It made me become very effective with limited firepower. I see that they have a stamina system and that your gear selections affect that. Its a nice touch but I want a little more restrictions placed on me.

I've been out of FPS for a while. What game had a bidding system where your team had to pick from limited resources and you requested what you wanted?

Re:Bidding system for weapons?

[WWWWolf]

Do you have to bid or pay for weapons like in other games?

No, but you need to pick a primary and secondary weapon and your gear and can't change them until you respawn, so that way you've got your limited firepower all right.

(This is from 2.8 beta. I haven't tried 3.0 beta yet, mostly because I needed to nuke it to get some temporary disk space. Hmm, got to reinstall it now...)

Re:Bidding system for weapons?

[masiman]

True about picking weapons, there is no bidding. False about switching. You can drop one of your weapons and pick up a weapon that has been left by a fragged player. You also inherit their weapons attribs (shooting mode and ammo). Any changes you make to your "start" setup will not come into effect until you respawn. There is usually what you are looking for laying around the battlefield. There are limitations in what is available as a primary and secondary weapon. The new setup makes it visually more like paintball though (very distinct team markings). This goes a little against the idea that you are shooting for blood. If I went into combat I would wear the minimum of identifiers and rely on comms and battlefield awareness to keep friendly fire at a minimum. But that's just me. That would be an interesting attribute option to add, limiting weapon selection. I would want that as an option however, not required. These are pick up games though, so how to define who controls resources to decide who can pick what weapons and how the resources are acquired, etc. Sounds like it slows down starting the game, plus how do you let someone in midstream? Neat idea though. The rules could probably be worked out somehow.

TrueCombat !

[@madeus]

I'm surprised that this mod gets so much publicity while the excellent TrueCombat seems to get less.

I think quite a few people have worked on both mods, and I prefer TrueCombat.

They released a new version recently:
http://www.truecombat.com/

It has a more realistic feel IMO, and I think the models are better. It doesn't have lots of maps though. They even seem to have removed a few maps from the most recent version (unless I am mistaken) that's a shame because some of the old maps were really good, I can't see why they did that.

Re:TrueCombat !

[evil-osm]

Man, thanks for pointing out that site, the mod looks really slick! Too bad that PlanetQuake is using those full page adds now...

Really good mod...

[evil-osm]

I really liked UT (Urban Terror), it started to crop up around the time that Action Quake 2 started to die out (still an amazing mod btw, download it and play it if you get a chance). I know a few hard core AQ fans that have been salavating over UT for a while.

Does anyone know if Action Quake 2 is still being played at all? I know there is a "next gen" around. However are there still people playing the original?