Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
I hope everyone had a great weekend and for the Mom’s in particular that you enjoyed your special day on Sunday.
On a more somber note, I would like to express my deepest sympathy to our Canadian staff and community who were personally affected or had family affected by the massive wildfire in the City of Fort McMurray, Alberta. I wish you and your families all the best as you deal with this tragedy.
On the Studio front, it was another busy but productive week for the team working on all things H-Hour to continue our forward momentum. Activities completed included:
- The Workshop Monitors have finished developing their review process for new maps. This will get feedback back to map creators and the right maps spotlighted on our servers for the community to play. This process is now available in the Workshop forums and I encourage all content creators to review and apply these concepts to their maps before public release. This will help keep the quality of the workshop maps high and bring the best maps to the attention of the community.
- It has been an intensive week of training and code review. We’re still reviewing code but also consolidating and improving framework code and fixing issues or bugs as we find them.
- An early test patch of the revised code was built and reviewed this weekend by our dev testing team. They have provided feedback and test results to the Studio.
- The volume of workshop maps moving up and down the vote scale on Steam kept our two server operators busy this week adjusting rotations.
- A community War server was delivered for those who wished to challenge other teams in a friendly smack down session. We are all waiting to see this minion, shoe stomping event that seems to be brewing since that announcement was posted.
I know many of you would like to see a roadmap of development plans at this point so I thought I would address the current state. Until such time as I can secure an investor/partner and bring full time developers in, we will be working on a “deliver what you can, when you can” basis. I have personally witnessed the passion and time commitment of our volunteers in getting things done for the game and H-Hour community. It is in everyone’s best interests not to overwhelm this group by forcing arbitrary deadlines on them. I will keep you as up to date as I can on the happenings, deliverable dates are not something that will be included at this time. The team is, and will continue to, do its best to get content into your hands.
What’s Ahead?
Programming, IT build support and the dev testing team will continue working on a release worthy patch for the community. Current things planned to be worked on in this patch include potential:
- Changes to UE4 bandwidth limits to improve in game voice.
- Fix for 3rd equipment slot not working in in game Armory.
- Fix for Ready/Unready updating properly in Lobby.
- Addition of Options to Lobby menu so players can change settings.
- Fix for weapons ratings missing from LMGs.
- Fix for picking up a weapon doesn’t update the weapon name on HUD.
- Limit for grenade/flashbang/smoke equipment to two slots.
- Work on assertion errors in Extraction mode that may be the cause of certain client system setups experiencing crashes.
We are still talking with folks interested in supporting H-Hour both financially and resourcefully. It's not a fast process what so ever but we're till pounding the pavement and getting positive feedback.
I cannot adequately express how much I appreciate the volunteers who have been working so hard to keep the game moving in a positive direction. We are blessed to have so much talent extending a helping hand and their efforts are bearing fruit for the entire H-Hour Community. I personally want to thank our dev testers, programmer, steam and forum support, IT and server support, workshop monitors, map makers, and all those who promote this community in a positive light through video creation, services such as Discord or playing on the servers. This has truly become a community driven project. You guys and gals inspire me every day.
More next Monday…..