Info

Game:	Quake3 Urban Terror
Game Types:	Capture the Flag, Bomb Mode
Players:	8-14
Description:	North Africa urban setting.

Released:

• 2003-08-09 (Urban Terror Beta 3.0)

Background

After updating both abbey and village for beta3 it was about time to start work on a new map. Working on updates is well and good but it can tend to get old after a while.

There are a few themes I've been meaning to do for some time, a Japanese setting (the beta2 test map should of tipped you of to this), an Arctic map, and even, heavens forbid, a factory setting, but in the end I went with a desert theme.

Again sweetnutz's textures fit flawlessly in to the design. All that was needed was some more Arabic styled trimmings which were created fairly easily. There are numerous sources of media and architectural motifs for Arabian desert maps so most of the design proved rather easy to put together.

Heading into the gameplay design there were a few ideas that I was playing around with. Unlike most of my maps I wanted to provide a lot more area for players to move around indoors and pick people off from windows. I didn't want it to be overbearing, just offer some interesting options to players who wanted to sneak around a bit.

Another major point I wanted to incorporate was street oriented gunfights, with just enough cover for players to advance under fire.

The last and most probably important gameplay idea was the L shaped layout. Honestly I could make maps based around the classic quad + crossover design until the cows came home but I've been trying to work on different layout styles. Thats why village2 was a triangle-ish layout and austria was a three pronged layout. I do intend to go back to the classic ts style for my next new map.

Anyway sorry for the digression. As this was beta3 the map was primarily designed around bomb mode. I didn't really pay much attention to CTF until late in the piece, though I had an idea that it would work reasonably well. CTF generally does on L shaped maps.

The beta testing went fairly smoothly for the most part. I did try moving the blue spawn to the middle of back street but it didn't work all that well. There was simply no way for blue to gain a solid foothold in the rest of the map. So that was moved back to the well area one version latter.

I was very happy with algiers take-up on release. Both bomb and ctf played well, which were the main goals. The only problems I felt the map had visually were that the buildings seemed a little to regular for a casbah style setting, and the skyline was a bit flat.