Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour community!
In the interest of transparency, I want to provide some insight into our patch process.
Development is a complex process and developing with weekly patch goals makes the process even more challenging. Despite this, the studio team felt strongly enough about doing their best to get some content out to the community weekly whenever possible that they have continuously worked extra hours to get the job done. The team is proud that they have been able to release 24 patches to the game in our 6 months in Early Access.
In the beginnings of H-Hour’s development with a multitude of differing features or value added fixes that could be focused on, extra hours allowed us to catch up and get a release out. Today, however, we are reaching a point where most of the features left to come require more than a week to introduce, build and test. We try to juggle introductions that require larger development windows so we have something for the community every week.
As we added new features, assets, maps and game modes, we have seen our H-Hour code files increase by 20+ GB and the game grow from under 2 GBs to 7.4 GBs. Size does matter in this case. The time needed to build our link libraries and tools, cook the build, upload it and test the results has tripled which compresses the time available for actual game development. So as much as we hate to disappoint you, there will be times when we cannot achieve our stated weekly goal because we simply did not have the necessary time to correct reported test deficiencies.
Now let’s talk voice. As previously reported there were a limited number of in game voice options available for H-Hour. The most mature of these options involved tying into Steam’s voice chat code which is what you have today in game. It is apparent Steam voice has limitations so we recently devoted many person hours into identifying what those limits were, developing special tests and logs, working with our dev testers to come up with potential workarounds and coding and testing those workarounds. Behind the scenes we implemented code to allow larger network packets for voice which improved voice quality but caused in game stutter, we tried limiting channel use to a single user which surprisingly resulted in worse voice quality and we tried a combination of the two code sets which again, improved quality but still caused stutter despite the user limit. At this time, the code in game is the best quality result we have been able to achieve. Additional improvements would require the introduction of a new external voice option or a significant commitment of time in-house to build around the limitations we are experiencing. We believe with all the third party voice options available and in use by gamers and the time committment we would need to continue working on this issue, voice improvements should be parked until a later date so we can return our focus to other important game improvements the community has been requesting.
The dev team’s main activities for the rest of the week will be:
- Delivering the content and fixes that were in the works from last week.
- Introducing a first pass respawn mode for testing by the community. No stats will be connected for this mode. It’s primary function will be the same as it was in the early SOCOMs, a means for new players to get familiar with the game style, maps and modes before adapting to the more punishing and challenging one-life gameplay.
- Continuing the redesign of Sismis.
- Reviewing bug reports to pull and work on those we can complete.
- Continuing the work started last week on our new Hostage characters.
More next Monday.