Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios, President, Tom
Hello H-Hour community!
First off, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone for coming out and participating in our Q & A last Thursday on DomTron's Twitch. It was a great session that allowed us to touch on some of the biggest questions the community has had over the last couple of months. If you missed out on the live stream, follow the link to watch the broadcast in its entirety on Twitch.
If you want to sound off on anything discussed during the Q & A, head over the forums and join in on the discussion here. Thanks again to Dom and Vice for participating and to the community for watching and commentating. This was a great chance to speak with you all face to face.
In other news, Russ and I are heading to PAX Prime at the end of August. This four-day event in Seattle, Washington is one of the largest gaming events in North America and another great opportunity to get the word out about H-Hour. The folks over at Intel will be running H-Hour in their cyber café giving thousands of people the opportunity to check out the game. Russ and I will be walking the floor and holding meetings with folks interested in hearing more about H-Hour. Like we did with E3, we'll provide updates on our social media throughout our time at PAX.
Now on to some information about H-Hour development: Last Friday a new update launched for H-Hour including several features for which fans have been waiting. This included, among other bug fixes and general game play improvement:
- The addition of a second equipment slot. A third equipment slot will be added when the next weapon update (PMN mines and claymores) is added to the game.
- Additional weapon tuning on the M16 and the M4A1 in the ongoing process of getting the weapons to feel just right
- A first pass on a leaderboard added to the game, pulling and displaying stats directly from your Steam friends list
- A ton of new props added to Factory, including air conditioning units on the rooftops and new props in the loading zone. Other additions were made to the map included improvements on sound and collision throughout the map. Much more is still to come on this map so keep your eyes open!
As always, head over to the forums to share your thoughts on the patch.
As for what the team is working on this week, here is a taste:
- The team is polishing up the animations. We are making sure the animations are lining up properly. Sometimes when using aim offsets, the gun may not be facing the direction you want it to face (i.e. leaning right, the gun may look off a little to the right). We are in the tedious process of going through the animations and making small adjustments to bones to make sure the character always looks right. We are also adding sound effects to all the animations. We have hundreds of animations that all need sound effects at various frames (hand touching the ground, knee hitting the ground, etc.) Again, this can be tedious but we want to make sure everything looks right when the animations are added to the game.
- One of the biggest complaints the team is hearing right now is about the windows in Factory and not being able to shoot through them. Sometimes the glass is so transparent it looks like there is no glass when there is. Right now we are looking at getting rid of a majority of the glass or making it breakable. We are hoping to have a solution in for the windows before the next patch.
Thanks, as always, for your continued support!