Urban Terror HD: Going Away From Open-Source

[pingufunkybeat]

Did I miss something?

Urban Terror was a GPL game? I don't think so. Only the engine (ioquake) was GPL, the rest was all very much proprietary.

They just switched the engine, that's all. They started on top of a proprietary engine, which got open sourced at some point, and now they are moving to the proprietary one again.

You can still download ioquake3, you didn't lose anything, other than some closed and proprietary add-ons which were never free to begin with.

More info here (from 2007): http://ioquake3.org/2007/12/23/urban-terror-41/

[birdie]

Q3 shows its age, that's all.

I cannot even understand when people decide to release something using 11 yo engine.

However it's strange they chose UE3 engine - nowadays there are much better looking graphics engines available.

[pingufunkybeat]

Like Carmack said in one interview, The Q3 engine is pretty much the best that you can reasonably have for a fast competitive twitch shooter (which most of the Quake games were).

There is a good reason why Doom3 and Quake4 multiplayer never caught on. Most of the extra cool stuff gets disabled by any experienced player, and this is exactly the demographic UrT is targeting.

If you look at successful online competitive shooters, most of them use very old engines, often updated with small, necessary improvements and eye-candy. You don't need per-pixel lighting in a competitive online match, in fact, you don't want it.

Besides: UrT is a really really old Q3 mod. I played it almost 10 years ago.

[yotambien]

Did I miss something?

Urban Terror was a GPL game? I don't think so. Only the engine (ioquake) was GPL, the rest was all very much proprietary.

That was exactly my impression. Too lazy to look it up now, though. And given the nature of the announcement, I care even less now about UT than 5 minutes ago--if that's at all possible.

[damipereira]

All my hope of having linux open-source game progress has just demolished, urt was my favoutire game and one of the things I liked was it being opensource, and I felt very excited by all of the new games that would use the new improvements to the ioquake3 engine. I hope something like what happens with nexuiz and xonotic happens here too, we're losign big games, this is not good.

[pingufunkybeat]

urt was my favoutire game and one of the things I liked was it being opensource

I was never open source.

All the sounds, maps, textures, graphics, and all the qvm game logic were closed source, from day one.

It's just that id released ioquake3 as GPL some time along the way, so all this closed source ran on top of an open engine for a short while, which is being corrected now.

There was never any intention to release any of UrT's assets as open source.

[yogi_berra]

Whats really interesting here is that they are not trying to capitalise on the much updated ioquake3 engine (compared to the original circa 1999 quake3 engine).

Do you really think that highly of SDL input and png textures?

[curaga]

PNG is a major improvement to the other formats supported. Disregarding all the bugfixes and portability improvements too?

[DeepDayze]

Next announcement will be this stupid game is exclusive for Windows and MacOS X. No more Linux builds cuz the potential 'market' is negligible. Bah

Maybe they should at least build it so it is Wine-friendly.

[whatever]

Do you really think that highly of SDL input and png textures?

+SDL Sound (This includes Pulseaudio support)
+OpenAL Sound
+IPv6
+VoIP
...