Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
Over the last week the team has continued working on the slow process of upgrading our UE4 engine version. All I can say is reviewing, merging and re-coding 12,000 files across 3 engine release versions and numerous sub versions was an enormous task for the team. I am happy to announce that as of this morning, we have successfully migrated all engine files to version 4.11.2.
Successful migration of the engine is only step one of the process though so more work needs to be completed next including the migration changes for the game’s source files to restore all previous functionality to the game. UE4 engine 4.11.2 will bring the potential for performance enhancements and upgraded tools. Frankly, engine upgrades break things and they need to be fixed afterwards but the effort is worthwhile. Once complete, the team will have access to tools that allow them to improve things such as in game FPS, rendering of graphical resources, animation and audio. Implementing these improvements will be staggered across future patches as time and resources permits.
The team also updated our Trello Road Map to bring it up to date with current work plans. Bug reports are not included in the Road Map as those exist for current features and are tracked elsewhere. The Road Maps main goal is to list the features that are still to be delivered as part of the original scope for H-Hour’s gold release and to track the “wish list” of improvements the community would like added to the game. If you feel we have missed a key feature, please let us know so we can update Trello. While visiting don’t forget to vote up your favorite features so the team has a feel for what is most important to the community.
Other activities completed last week included setting up and running a Sniper Only event on Saturday evening for everyone, changing the spotlight server to give some exposure to Profil’s new Wayland Series of maps and running a poll for some upcoming server changes. Want us to consider other activities while we all wait for the updates, post your suggestions!
What’s Ahead?
- Focus will now shift to our game specific source and updating those files in line with the new code. Many, many changes will be required to bring H-Hour source in line with the new engine version and it is only through this review that we can identify and update our game code in preparation for our next patch.
- We are taking advantage of the current offline upgrade of the engine and game to move our source control depot and bug tracking systems to a larger facility.
- We plan on implementing another spotlight server to feature more of the new community maps as well as draw attention to some of the other maps where significant improvements have been made by the authors. I encourage everyone to vote on the Workshop and provide feedback to the authors so they can continue to improve their maps.
- Had a great call on Friday with a group of folks who’ve been following H-Hour for some time and are interested in seeing H-Hour get across the finish line. We’re reviewing some of the documents now and will have more, for them, later this week. I’m hopeful that something good will come from this engagement. So, keep doing what you’re doing because people definitely notice the passion behind this project.
I want to close out by thanking the many volunteers, mappers and community members who continue to do their best in support of this project. You guys and gals are an inspiration.
More next Monday…..