We recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with DOKTA8, OSWALD, and SWEETNUTZ from the Urban Terror mod team. 

(PCShooter) What is your name and primary job on the Urban Terror team?

[OSWALD]: My named is Oswald and I am the Project Coordinator and also responsible for the Public Relations work for Urban Terror

[DOKTA8]: My name is Dokta8 and I’m the leader of the Coding Team.

[SWEETNUTZ]: I'm SweetnutZ, my primary job for Q3UT is to create/work with the graphic identity of Urban Terror, interface menus and media advertisements.

(PCShooter) Can you give us an overview of what Urban Terror is all about?

[DOKTA8]: Urban Terror is loosely based around team combat in conventional urban settings.  The main aim of the game is to give FPS players a game that is fun and fast, but also mixed in with a generous amount of realism.

[SWEETNUTZ]: Urban Terror is about having fun in a real life setting. We have no locked concept at the moment such as Side A vs. Side B. That will change however in beta 3.0 as we work towards more defined mission types. For now, our goal was to create a fairly fast paced but fun realism game, without laying too
heavily on either un-realism or realism. Emphasis on fun over realism.  

(PCShooter) What are you trying to accomplish with this mod?  Also, are you trying to have something totally different from anything else in the mod community?

[OSWALD]: To the untrained eye or uninformed gamers, Urban Terror probably looks like another "realism clone." But Silicon Ice is attempting to emphasis the "fun over realism" aspect, since this is what will keep gamers interested and coming back for more. From my past experience in different mod communities, I feel our approach and interaction with the community is somewhat unique. While we do have the final say to the direction of the mod, we do communicate our actions and plans for upcoming features to the mod. We really do not have anything to hide from our community and I think this is an aspect you do not find in many communities.

[DOKTA8]: I guess we’re trying to mix the fun that we felt from mods like Action Quake 2 with some of the more sophisticated features in more recent mods and games from the realism genre.  The two major influences are Action Quake 2 and Counterstrike (and we’re not ashamed of that).  But at the end of the day I guess we’d like people to see us as offering a new game that offers an alternative style of game play to Counterstrike.

[SWEETNUTZ]: I think some of our new and unique features will really interest people. With our advanced hit detection and particle systems, our ledge climbing and totally kickass user interface. I say the last part totally unbiased. Completely unbiased.

(PCShooter) Many say this mod is more realistic than the standard Q3 game, is this a fair assumption?

[DOKTA8]: I certainly hope so!  We’ve worked hard to put together a highly sophisticated hit location system we’ve dubbed the “ARIES” (anatomical ray intersection and extrapolated severity) hit detection system that allows us to accurately determine where a player gets wounded.  We spent hours tweaking weapon physics so they’d “feel” right, and we’ve tried.

[SWEETNUTZ]: Most definitely. Urban Terror has many real world elements, in fact most. We concentrated on reality with game play considerations.

(PCShooter) What tools did you use to create such a realistic mod?

[DOKTA8]: A variety.  The code team uses the Microsoft Visual C++ coding environment.  The player models were designed and animated in 3D Studio Max, and the weapon models were developed in lightwave.  I believe all the texture artists used Adobe Photoshop.

[SWEETNUTZ]: I used a variety of tools, from pencil/pen/paper on original concepts, to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for more final versions. I also learned and used Quake3 Team Arena .menu and .shader scripting languages for the interface menus.

(PCShooter) What are the different multiplayer games incorporated into this mod?

[DOKTA8]: We have a number of different game play modes.  My favorite is Follow the Leader.  In this mode, one person on each team is selected randomly to be a “leader” for the round.  Each side has a flag to protect, like in CTF, but only the leader can touch an enemy flag.  Your team gets 3 points if your leader reaches the flag, 2 points if you defeat the other team while you leader is alive, and 1 point for defeating the enemy team with you leader dead.

For the next major release we are working on a project that should provide the community with a few really interesting new ways of playing the game.

(PCShooter) What are the differences between Urban Terror and other mods?

[OSWALD]: These days, being truly different is an increasing challenge. While the basic ideas and genre of Urban Terror being similar to many other mods, I feel our interaction and dedication to our community is something special. We really want to make Urban Terror a community based mod. While Silicon Ice Development is the driving force behind the development, it is the community who will be the true judge of its success.

[DOKTA8]: One of our main differences is our community.  We have a strong and supportive community who we talk to a lot in forums and in IRC.  We like to get feedback about the mod and we try to answer everyone’s questions, and implement as many workable suggestions as we can.  We like to think the community drives our development.

[SWEETNUTZ]: Well, Urban Terror is obviously different from non-realism mods in that you
play in a real world setting with real world firearms. From other realistic mods, you will have to play it for yourself and decide. A good deal of thought was put into making the game play unique and different then
what anyone had ever played before.

(PCShooter) Will there be any single player missions in the next beta release?

[DOKTA8]: No, we don’t have any plans for single player.  

(PCShooter) Are there any new things you’re working on for the next beta release, maps, models, etc.?

[DOKTA8]: Well, we just did a MAJOR release that added new everything.  The next release will probably add a couple more weapons and a new game play mode.  New maps are going to be released in a map pack well before then, and there’ll also be numerous small patches.

[OSWALD]: Beta 2 was out best effort yet on Urban Terror. While the next major release will be Beta 3, we are concentrating our efforts on a patch that will be released within the coming weeks. The focus of this patch is mainly bug fixes. Thanks to community input and further team play, we have run into a few nasty bugs that are causing some issues with Beta 2. The patch will be Beta 2.1, watch out web site for more details.

[SWEETNUTZ]: With beta 2.1 we are concentrating on bug fixes and a few weapon tweaks to satisfy the masses, plus 4-5 new maps. With 3.0 we will talk more about that as we near it, but right now we are mainly discussing the direction we would like to take for new game play modes, maps and weapons.

(PCShooter) What are your thoughts and opinions on the mod community as a whole?

[OSWALD]: When it comes to the Urban Terror Community, the support has been excellent! There are those die hards who have stuck together with us since Beta 1, along with many who have more recently entered into the community. Regardless, without a supportive and interactive gamers, Urban Terror would cease to exist.

[DOKTA8]: We love the community.  Without them, we simply would never have got to even first beta stage.  It’s really the community that makes the mod scene possible.

[SWEETUTZ]: I think the mod community is fairly strong right now, there are a ton of quality game conversions out there. I am a little unsure of the possibility of mods becoming more and more professional, and whether that is good for the mod community however. As the bar is raised, more and more GOOD mods could potentially be left behind as they lack either support from game creators, or the advertisement press of gaming sites. Early beta's appear to almost exclusively be compared to final products of other mods now, which I do not believe is a good thing.

(PCShooter) How long has this mod been in development and are you pleased with the outcome so far?

[OSWALD]: The mod was start back in September, 1999 but Bot Killer, who began working on a third party map pack that would support Quake III. The project would include new real world maps and machine guns only. Seeing as this was a "realistic" a weapon that Quake III features. The mod has really taken off with the release of Beta 2. The development team is very pleased with the outcome to this point. There were some doubts with the less than average release of Beta 1 back in August, 2000. We have made great strides to improve the overall experience of Urban Terror.

[DOKTA8]: We’ve been working on the mod for some 18 months.  I wasn’t really happy with the 1.x betas because they weren’t very professional or sophisticated.  I mean, they were fun, but our goal was to get the game out there so the community could be involved with its development, warts and all.

[SWEETNUTZ]: Since the very first work on the mod had started, it has been just under a year and a half since pre 1.0. Last august we premiered Beta 1.0 at Quakecon to a good reception. We did not start on the 2.0 project cycle until around the new year however, so to go from 1.0 to 2.0 in the time we did is actually pretty good considering it was a full code re-write, along with completely new graphics/models/skins.

(PCShooter) In your opinion, is the quake engine limiting what you can create for Urban Terror?

[DOKTA8]: Not at all.  The engine is very sophisticated.  Okay, so you use anything for long enough and you start thinking about new features you’d like to add to the engine, but we have not really hit any substantial walls.  The main issue for us is that the basic Quake3 game was designed as a shooter.  Thing like elevators and other similar detail just weren’t in the basic game, so we’ve had to code a lot from scratch.

[SWEETNUTZ]: Every engine is limiting to a degree. So yeah in some aspects, it is partially limiting. But in other areas I find the Quake3 engine to provide avenues of development I never would have even considered or thought of, had other limitations not been there. Part of any development process is knowing the limits, pushing what you can and improvising in other areas. What's funny is I thought the engine was more limiting then it really was at the beginning of development because I was still learning what could be done. Now that I look back, it really does almost everything I could want it to do.

(PCShooter) Is there anything else you would like to say to the mod community?

[OSWALD]: I would like to recognize our growing community and pay them a wealth of gratitude and thanks, for where they have put Urban Terror within the mod community. We are very excited about the prospects for the future and look forward to continued interaction and support.

[DOKTA8]: If you’re into realism mods and you haven’t played Urban Terror yet, give us a go.  If you’re one of the regular players already hooked who have shot us up to the second most popular Quake 3 mod, then you know we love you already!

[SWEETNUTZ]: Just to spread the word to all your friends about Urban Terror - and to keep being friendly. I really enjoy the Urban Terror community in general, they are smart, informed and quality people. It is my sincere hope that if we grow larger in numbers that this attitude will stay.

Thank you for your time.  We really appreciate you taking the time for this interview and wish you the best of luck in the future.  

Visit their website @ www.urbanterror.net