Been sitting on this thought for a week or so since I learned of FS's intent to move to the impressive UT4 engine.

A few thoughts first on my perspective towards their announcement. At first, there's the wow factor of any tangible HD news hitting the wire. Then, the first glance wow of the casa screenshot. Finally, the feeling of moving this game to a modern engine that will likely hold its own for quite some time to come.

As a forward-thinking wily duck, I tend to avoid things like oncoming jet engines that would turn me into a crouton salad. The UT4 engine is an extremely powerful, versatile engine designed to be future-resistant. It has immense capabilities, meant for triple-AAA games, simulations, and other highly flexible purposes that a developer may pursue. While UT4 sports many amazing visual effects, it also is designed to give developers outstanding ease of control, including real-time editing, within the production of a game.

Consider the effort put in by FS thus far to bring 4.2 to the community. In that effort, I don't mean stepping from 4.1 to 4.2, I mean the ~13+ years Silicon Ice/Frozen Sand has invested into designing, building, growing, and maintaining this game. Creating Urban Terror has not been a small feat. Let's not even discuss how 3rd party maps/tools/admins/support/etc factor into the games' ecosphere; obviously, there are many moving parts to UrT.

Having made the formal announcement, keeping in mind the dead-end Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine migration initiative, it should be assumed that FS has already done their homework in choosing UT4. For the power, portability, options, flexibility, support, experience, licensing, and I suppose desirability, there's only two other competitors of interest: Unity, and Crytek.

It actually surprises me that FS choose UT4 over Unity, though the intent seems transparent - UrTHD under the UT4 engine is a viable move towards commercialization of the game. Had they gone with Unity, sure commercialization is definitely an option, the strategy would appear to be more community-oriented, versus commercialization. // This is an opinion, I do not know these things for certain.

A quick googling makes the decision to pick UT4 a lot more obvious in terms of licensing costs:
Unreal: $19/mo + 5% of gross revenue resulting from any commercial products built using UE4
Unity: $1500 one-time, or a minimum of $75/mo per user
Cryengine: $9.90/mo

Why not Cryengine? Possibly to do with system performance requirements.

While the prospect of embracing UT4 is exciting, personally I would have rather FS picked Unity. Unity offers a very comparable feature set. I've used their interface and tools - made a crude 3d fps game in only a couple days. Not to say one couldn't do that with UT4, but I did like Unity's style of development. On the other side of the fence, if you haven't played UT2004, Onslaught mode, you haven't experienced truly sweat-inducing FPS team gameplay. Vehicles. Per-map mods. Urban Terror-esque speed and agility. Many good memories that give a nod to seeing UT4 and UrTHD.

Many of these things conclude in making moving to UT4 sound like a great idea. I'm not convinced. The UrT community will need to be reborn, which is a painful process. Next, let's imagine FS has put enough resources into this decision to commit to making an alpha version of UrTHD in UT4. I predict that from that time of commitment, it will require another 6 months of development to fully grasp the scale of development required, to get them to beta. I'm estimating: 2 years. A lot of developers will have to go through the learning curve of Unreal technology. How about that nice anti-cheat system developed for 4.2? Porting from idTech to Unreal is far from 1:1. I sure hope FS realizes that a new UrT needs to expand it's gameplay features...

Different subject, we'll circle back.

Towards the end of last year, I began a project that I hoped would spur an entirely new movement in Urban Terror mapping: Wily's Community Map Development Repo. The purpose is simple. Utilize a platform that facilitates community development of UrT maps. In other words, instead of one mapper being a one-man army in developing a map, use open-source principles to allow any number of people to contribute towards a map's development. This way, we would hypothetically get more maps, higher quality maps, produced faster. It's a win-win for everyone.

Then came the CustomMapMakers (CMM) map contest, headed by JohnnyEnglish, which you may have seen on the UrT.info main page. Idea was that people submitted concepts and drawings of a map they'd like to see created, then vote on the submitted ideas, then CMM builds the map to the winners spec. Seemed interesting, so I got to talking to Johnny. He offered me a spot on his Team. He already had a team of 8! I offered to do shaders with my limited time, but was quickly promoted to team leader. Since I now was responsible for implementation, I'd figured this was the perfect opportunity to put my dev repo to the test. Got everyone on board, ran a test dev project to get everyone familiarized over a week, everything was looking great. The winner's map got off to an amazing start, development-wise. Unfortunately, things got off-track, team chemistry got flat, and I stepped out. Haven't touched UrT since.

There's no reason such dev repo's can't apply to UT4 development. In fact, to produce enough extra content, more maps, etc, to keep people interested if/when UrTHD is released, a movement of community-developed maps is critical. It's not difficult to imagine: "YAY WHOA URTHD ON UT4 OMG!!", then best-case scenario "YEA PLAYS JUST LIKE URT4!! LOOKS AWESOME", then "yea plays just like urt4, except with far fewer maps. hmm. getting bored.". New visuals (AS I'VE STATED COUNTLESS TIMES) are like carbs - taste great, burns fast, turns to fat if you're not burning them, and you get hungry for more in short order. That's unsustainable. UrTHD needs some meat!

Now for the bombshell. A while back, Zafrius did a ut_superman mockup in the Crysis engine. It is highly unlikely I will commit to porting superman to UT4 as Supersoldier (until I have a game company that can create the whole game! :D). There are not a lot of maps in UrT that include the .map file for others to work with. UrTHD is going to need some strong 3rd party maps. If this UT4 engine is all it's cracked up to be, let's see how it handles the beast of idtech3. I propose releasing ut4_superman/2-beta as a community-developed map, and the first 3rd-party community-developed map for UT4!

My development method has included portability. A UT4 Supersoldier map should play just as well as ut4_superman plays in vanilla q3 or any other q3 mod, minus the total conversion modding of UrT. This means the map should be playable, testable, with most features in-tact, without relying upon FS's UrTHD release schedule.

I can facilitate the dev repo. Interested people will need a github account, git, and I will need to add their github user to the repo. From there, the future of this map falls to the community. I think that's a pretty amazing thing.

Haven't read the whole post, the only thing i want to add is a quote from Fenix:

"Fenix schrieb:

I personally do not believe in UrT HD. It's still a too far away project (we are talking about years) and people keep quitting FS so I don't see how they'll manage to get the game out and more over why they would do that. Sad but true, there are no-lifers around who instead of getting a girlfriend and live their lives, prefer to hack the website of a free videogame....for what I have not understood, but hey the world is in desperate need of stupid people (otherwise we can't distinguish stupid guys from the rest of the world"

I don't even think about HD yet.

Well. I know what silence means around here. Unfortunately I can only surmise why without real information.

Just remember. UrT Superman would have never gotten anywhere, let alone popular, had it not been for the pushes and motivation by the community. I totally understand the feelings towards UrTHD. Just thinking about the vaporware-of-a-game makes me scoff.

Alright, for the time being, the people have spoken. We'll have to think of something else.

I'd love for FS to succeed and further improve and innovate UrT, but honestly I have my doubts.

For a 14 year old game UrT 4.1 had a surprisingly large community with lots of players, clans, forums, servers and tourneys. A little over year ago you could join the superman server any time of the day and find at least half a dozen players and at peak times it always was full, today you're lucky to find someone for a short 1-vs-1. Same goes for the other servers. Unless there's something I'm missing or wrong with my masterserver list, there are only 2 servers left that see some constant action (FA & pwny). If the update to 4.2 put people off, I doubt UrTHD will turn the ship around – theres just too much competition by other good games out there.

cheers
MT

I've heard players complain about the lighting in 4.2. Hard to spot players in certain situations, etc. The one screen shot that I saw of HD, on our home page, is terrible lighting. When you take a photo, what's the first thing that they teach you? Don't shoot directly INTO the sun. Keep the sun behind you to better light the subject. If there was a player behind that fountain, do you think you could spot him quickly?
I have hopes for a new game engine, but we all saw how long it took to develop 4.2. How many years will it take to develop a new UrT built on the UnT engine?

Wily

We've missed you at CMM, well I have. The serengeti project is still proceeding, the announcement that UrtHD would use Unreal Engine has actually made that project more possible and a whole lot more exciting.

But, the main reason I re-registered here was this ...

"with. UrTHD is going to need some strong 3rd party maps. If this UT4 engine is all it's cracked up to be, let's see how it handles the beast of idtech3. I propose releasing ut4_superman/2-beta as a community-developed map, and the first 3rd-party community-developed map for UT4!"

You've got a race on then, I also intend to be the first to produce a working map for the new engine, currently well advanced with my first in a series of skeet shoot maps.

Of course, now it's possible to use actual skeet and not bots.

Here's my current progress :

Really looking interesting there Johnny.
Don't get me wrong. The new engine looks great! It's just that we have seen how long it takes to develop the game and iron out the bugs. Many feel they have been lied to in the past about what to expect and have been disappointed. Keeping my fingers crossed. I'm sure that mapmakers look at this differently than the ordinary player.

I'm not much help in creating a map but I'm good at testing for game play. Exciting...cant wait!