Info

Game:	Quake3 Urban Terror
Game Types:	Capture the Flag
Players:	10-16
Description:	European setting.
Download as part of the Urt retro pack from:	Urt-MapDepot Urban Base

Released:

• 2001-08-10 (Urban Terror Beta 2.3)

Background

This map originally started out with the name village-docks. The idea behind it was for the map to start out at a dock, and build up in levels to a summit bomb site (yes, we were considering bomb mode even before beta2).

After 2 months of development I wasn't at all happy with how it was proceeding. It was far to large, too much like the old village in style, and it would of undoubtedly played like crap, so I scraped it and started again with the name, austria.

I took roughly the same idea, as well as what I had learnt, adding the idea of starting from a old English style at the docks and working up to more classic modern setting near the top. This time I expanded on the overall style that I had started with abbey, adding additional details to the ground, including even more trim and developing a wider variety of buildings.

The skirting areas on the ground were added, like the steps, to both break up repetitive textures and add more detail. They ended up adding quite a hit to the r_speeds but the effect was quite worth it.

The variety of buildings was both a good and bad thing. They did take a while to make, and I was never fully happy with all of them, but the changes did improve the overall look of the map. Unlike abbey a map the size of austria couldn't work with just one style. I did make a mistake in trying to put to many different types of building together in one area. While real streets may have a huge variety of buildings in a small area, it never seems to work that well when mapping.

It was about halfway through development that the evening lighting, along with the glowing windows got added, finally adding some much needed atmosphere. I did play around with some various music samplings around the map but they got removed when trying to fit the map under the standard hunkmegs limit and never got added back in again.

By the end of development the map was still too large and too intricate. My ambitions had got the better of me. Because it took so long to complete it subsequently missed its beta2.0 release and got pushed well back, to the release of 2.3.

When released the initial reaction wasn't that great. The arena file got stuffed up somehow and the map didn't get run by a lot of people because of it. Bomb mode never made it in beta2 and left the map too big for good team survivor play. Casa also came out in that release, and well, we all know how that story went. Still it wasn't a horrible release by any means. The map was enjoyable in ctf and I learnt a great deal.

I did unfortunately take some wrong conclusions away from the map. I rightly thought that the map was too tight in connections, and the areas too separated, but when I got to Beta3.0 development I strayed to far the other way and made the maps to open and areas not separated enough. More so with village2 than abbey2 but the problem occurred in both.