Urban Terror: Urban Terror™ Team Profile

Urban Terror™ Team Profile

Urban Terror Team Profile

"Where Quake meets reality" is the motto the developers of Urban Terror have adopted. While many mod these days tend to focus on realistic game play, Urban Terror takes a "fun over realism" approach to the FPS arena.

As with Quake III Arena, gamers want speed, they do not want to feel bogged down by weapons and gear, but feel they can get down a street and take cover while under heavy fire or the wiz of a sniper's bullet. Unless of course that sniper is dialed in, then kiss your ass goodbye.

Urban Terror combined the speed of Quake III and a realism based theme to create the mod we have been developing since 1999. The mod has met with great success over the years, featured in magazines across the world, debuted and demoed at Quakecon in 2000-2002, featured on television and supported by gaming leagues worldwide.

The most important aspect of Urban Terror is the community and the fact the developers take a very hands on approach, interacting with the gamers who play the game. Many of the current features included today have been a result of community input and testing.

In Urban Terror you select from a list of weapons that allows you a primary, secondary and a sidearm as your firepower. With limited 'slots' to carry support items you must decide how you will load out your character before the battle begins.

Over the years FrozenSand, LLC (formerly Silicon Ice Development) has implemented some unique game features that enhance the playability of Urban Terror. One of the earliest features was the implementation of ledge-grabbing. This feature allows a player to jump and grab a ledge in order to pull themselves up. Since then we have added wall jumping and power slding to give the gamer more of an edge.

The introduction of stamina was met with much resistance from the community who felt the speed of the game was being diminished. This coming from an earlier (1.27) version that had no stamina, which played more like Action Quake 2 (for you old timers). While stamina did have an effect on the mod, the community soon adopted it, as in-game medics allow a gamer to be healed up, prevent lose of health and increasing their stamina.

There have been many levels created and supported by Urban Terror over the years, including a Capture the Flag and Bomb/Defuse mode that go along with Team Survivor. Some of the more popular levels include Casa, Turnpike, Abbey, Docks, Uptown, Riyadh, Rommel and Village. Over the years many of these "classic" levels have been updated, some in order to support new game modes or to fix problem areas and create new texture sets for them.

The mod has been in continual development since it's humble beginnings in late 1999. We have seen many team members come and go through the years. Some have been fortunate to be hired by companies such as Ravensoft, UbiSoft, Microsoft and 4D Rulers, thanks to their contributions to Urban Terror and the community.

While the team has continued to change, the core team members have been together for the past 2-3 years, continuing to support the mod and the community through updates and releases. There have been about 60 development team created levels over the years in support of the game.

Recent development has seen the introduction of a new "theme" after floating in the sea of identity crisis since its inception. Gone are military and Cold War theme and in come the Red Dragons vs SWAT. The "bad guys" are known as the Red Dragons, complete with orange prison jumpsuits with their biker chicks dressed in hot, bright leather duds. SWAT really needs no introduction, the best of the best when it comes a quick response, tactical assault team. SWAT pursues the Red Dragons through many unique scenarios (see levels) in hopes of bring them to justice.

All in all Urban Terror truly lives up to the developer's motto, "Urban Terror. Where Quake meets reality."

Team Bio's:

Name	Maureen 'Bladekiller' Yost
Location	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Position	Senior Artist / Level Designer / Animator / QA Manager
Bio	Artist proficient in Adobe Photoshop specializing in Q3 skinning for 6 years. Expert weapon and character model skinner. Level designer with 4 years experience in GTK Radiant. Modeller/Animator with over 1 year experience in 3D Studio Max She has been a Quality Assurance Manager for 3 years at a national telecommunications firm and for 4 years for Silicon Ice Development. Thrives in a team environment.

Name	Michael 'Dragonne' Conger
Location	New Jersey, USA
Position	Level Designer
Bio	After a 2 year break; Dragonne is back with his prolific mapping skills. Bringing a new vision and attention to detail to the Urban Terror environment, along with a high level of technical knowledge, his levels are unique and continue to bring solid gameplay and depth of immersion to the game.

Name	Florian 'Flash' Garcia
Location	Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France
Position	Animator / Modeler
Bio	Florian is an all around, “computer graphics rat." He has 10 years experience with Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (6 years professionally), 10 years modeling with 3D Studio (from 3D Studio 4 to 3D Studio Max 7.1), including plugins and some renderware. He also has some experience with Maya and Lightwave. Normal mapping expert. Three years of level designer experience (GTK Radient, Battlecraft, UnrealEd, Hammer2) and experience with the Battlefield series engine, Quake 3 engine, Unreal engine 2 and Half-Llife2 engine.

Name	Rob 'Lt1' Bergman
Location	Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States
Position	Modeler / Texture Artist
Bio	Rob has 7+ years as a enviromental artist working with mainly 3D Studio Max and Maya (and yes, Milkshape)., including texture creation for CG work (i.e. models and level design). His skills also have him doing sound and video post production work. His previous work includes several successful mod teams useing the Quake 3 engine, Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and Unreal 2 engine. Currently Rob works as a project developer for a Fortune 500 company developing and deploying a corporate wide tracking system.

Name	Jonathan 'Null' Norton
Location	Isle of Man, British Isles
Position	Level Designer
Bio	Jon brings in over 10 years experience of level design in quake engine games; of which 7 years have been for urban terror, using a seamless combination of both radiant and 3DSMax. Also experience of texture creation and manipulation in Photoshop, and minor dabbling in tools programming.

Name	Jeff 'RabidCow' Barkley
Location	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Position	Lead Level Designer / Modeler / Artist
Bio	Extensive experience in photography and the creation of high quality phototextures in Photoshop. Two years experience modeling and uvw-unwrapping in 3D Studio Max, 4 years with Radiant. Experienced with several 3D applications for the creation of environments, such as VUE 5 Infinite, Terragen, and Bryce. Jeff has worked in a team environment as a level designer for SID and also as a business specialist for a telephone company.

Name	Tai Chi Minh Ralph 'Raedwulf' Eastwood
Location	York, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Position	Programmer
Bio	A University of York student who has a keen interest in game and graphical programming. He has been previously involved with Eastfront and currently involved with the XreaL (as well as the Urbanterror) project as well. Hence, this has provided a good deal of experience with the Quake3 engine.

Name	Denis 'Kalish' Bajram
Location	France
Position	Programmer and Artist
Bio	Comics artist and writer, he has written a science-fiction saga "UW1" Universal War One for 10 years. He is the lead programmer behind the new upcoming Passport system for Urbanterror.

Name	Robert 'RaideR' Baxter-Kaneen
Location	London, United Kingdom
Position	Programmer
Bio	A qualified network engineer, he manages the network for an independent school. He handles the development for web-side of the Passport system.

Name	Frank ’Frankie V’ Van Noordt
Location	British Columbia, Canada
Position	Senior Artist/Lead Animator
Bio	Proficient in 3ds Max and Motion Builder. 10 Years practical experiences in game animation and design beginning in 1999 with the introduction of Quake 3 from id software. Has also generalized in 3d graphics since inspired by the movie Tron in 1982.

Name	Chip "Mr. Bean" Casper
Location	New York, USA
Position	Modeler/texture artist
Bio	Artist specializing in 3ds Max and Photoshop; 3 years experience with both programs. His experience and skills have been focused on modeling, but have lately broadened to include texturing. Enjoys creating a wide variety of models, from props and vehicles to sci-fi robots; lately has been learning character modeling. Only recently joined the Urban Terror development team. He loves CG and creating models for video games, and is constantly learning and looking for ways to add to his skills.

Name	Aino 'Decoy' Toonder
Location	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Position	UrT Passport Administrator / Speicial Projects Support
Bio	Aino is a long time supporter of Urban Terror who now forfills an admin roll helping to manage all of our systems that help Urban Terror to function. In charge of the Passport System with RaideR and Kalish he will be on hand to support you in any way he can. Also he owns his own Marketing company!

Name	Seti
Location
Position	Anticheat Programmer
Bio

Name	Hobbes
Location
Position	Programmer
Bio

Name	Dave 'ShminkyBoy' Snyder
Location	Warwick, Rhode Island, United States
Position	Level Designer
Bio	Dave brings a variety of things to the table of game development. He has 6 years of experience in R&D and design for the game/toy industry and 5 years of experience as a game level designer. He also has 9 years of experience in audio production and 3 years in the graphics/texture art fields.

Name	Jeremy 'Sinni' Diegel
Location	Kalispell, Montana, United States
Position	Level Designer
Bio	Born and raised in Kalispell, Jeremy has been playing with computers for 25+ years. When it comes to computers and applications, he's self taught on everything. Has experimented with coding, modeling, Foley work, and numerous other things. Has over 10 years of mapping experience witch started with Quake2 Digital Paintball. Is familiar with Adobe Photoshop, Cooledit, Milkshape3d, and QuArK (doesn't use radiant since he's to dumb to figure it out). He also wrote the addon for UrbanTerror that is distributed with the download of QuArK. Pretty much he's the goto guy if you need something done, he can usually deliver.

Name	Peter 'TwentySeven' McNeill
Location	Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
Position	Lead Programmer / Designer
Bio	Senior Level C++ programmer specializing in content and art tool development. Proficient with modern graphics APIs, network coding, the Quake 3 and Doom 3 SDKs. Peter has worked on several titles for Perception and 4D Rulers. While halfway around the globe, Peter seems to live off an unlimited supply of caffeine because you can seemingly find him online at all hours of the day.

Name	Erik 'woekele' K.
Location	Enschede, the Netherlands
Position	Project Coordinator / General helper
Bio	His job is to try and keep everything moving in one direction. He worked on ioUrbanTerror so people are able to play Urban Terror without needing Quake 3 Arena. Also he revamped the ingame menus and is an active QA and forum member.