Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
We have seen many new members join the community with the Workshop sale …welcome to H-Hour! To help you in hooking up with your fellow gamers, I recommend you get yourself hooked up with the community run Discord voice server. Our existing players would love to help you get comfortable in playing H-Hour.
For new members and those who are just downloading all the Workshop maps, you are likely to experience a very long load times on initial start of the game after that download. This happens as UE4 must grab the new map content and move it into the game’s files. So remember if you download a lot of maps at one time, it is going to take time to load everything on first start. Be patient and let the load finish.
With a good week of playtime on the new community created maps, the clear favorites are starting to rise to the top. Voting for your favorites is important as it lets everyone know how the maps rank. So don’t forget to do this on the Steam Workshop and give the map creators feedback so they can keep improving their content for you.
The volume of maps released in that short window made it difficult to manage servers. It also made it hard on the community to keep track of the new maps and subscribe so they would not receive “travel errors”. (Yes, those travel error messages mean you do not have the map content so need to go to Workshop and subscribe.)
To make things easier for members, late last week we moved to separating server content based on vote level in Steam with 4+ Star level maps getting more servers assigned. This should relieve some of the download pain for players as you can decide just to download those maps. For those who want to check out more maps we setup separate servers for other vote levels for doing that as well. We also featured our newest map that was released (Stockpile by PurpleUrkel) so the creator could get some exposure and feedback from the community.
Congratulations to the following map creators on their current 4 Star status in the Workshop. Job well done!
Hype for Ruins
SelflessOne for Sub Rosa
RMRanger for killingfields
RMRanger for Citadel
Vice_President for Desert Raid Extraction
Babadook for Fish Hook
Poisoncobra2 for Fallen
Harry62 for Black Vein
On the server side, I want to send thanks out to our Dev Testing group members who took on this daunting task: AlphaMale, LYNCH and RosieRascal. They have done a ton of work getting the root servers and game servers setup to handle the Workshop maps and in keeping them running and up to date for us all.
They are now looking for H-Hour community feedback on what you would like to see for workshop servers so posts are up on Steam and our Forums for this purpose. They cannot implement every suggestion but will look to see which are most popular and work best for everyone.
Last but not least, we welcomed Nikita (tconscout) into the Moderation team this past week. She is a special lady with a passion for the game and community so will be a great addition to our staff.
What’s Ahead?
- The map creator side of the Workshop will be publically released later today. Links to the Workshop map creation tools including the guide and video tutorials will be added to our Workshop pages on the Forums and Steam. Big thanks to AlphaMale, Rosie and SelflessOne for all the time they put into the guide and tutorials.
- The team has been working on a cleanup in the private Workshop forums over the weekend. Once the cleanup is complete today, those forums will be made public. That will allow new map creators to benefit from some of the great discussions or information shares that developed in there during the beta.
- We are setting up a community led Workshop Monitor team from volunteers within our existing Beta. They will screen new maps, give feedback to authors and let the server operators know when a map is ready to be highlighted on a server. It is in everyone’s’ interest that the Workshop contain quality content and the addition of this support will help us do just that.
- A Workshop map Subscriber App was created and is now available for download. Basically its purpose is mainly for those who want to easily clean up their map subscriptions or for those who are having update issues with their subscribed content. It displays a list of your items and allows for singular unsubscribes or the ability to force update everything using the Resub option.
- Bug report review is over 50% complete and Mikfail and the testers will continue to review and test those remaining.
- With this stage of the WorkshopApps complete, Jason has agreed to begin reviewing our source code to see where he can provide some fixes for the game. Rosie will be working on getting him setup and familiar with the use of our source control tools this week.
- I had a great conversation with a group of industry leaders on Friday discussing opportunities to get H-Hour to a fully released title. Even though the call was more a discovery call it quickly turned into a call to action. I’ll continue to work with this group to see if we can make something happen. Nothing moves fast with these types of talks but at least we’re having them J.
The efforts by our H-Hour Community to keep getting the word out on social media, stream gameplay, post videos and promote the game to the public has been great again this week. The player base has improved and server counts are up and that is in large part due to this communities efforts. You guys and gals are a huge part of making this dream happen. Keep playing on the servers and doing what you are doing as it is all helping.
Thank you to each and every one of you.
More next Monday…..