Posted on Behalf of SOF Studio President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
Around the Studio:
The team that works on H-Hour are amazingly resilient. They work on this title because it is their passion and despite it being a full-time second job for some of them. They recognize the pitfalls of being associated with an Early Access indie developer creating a niche game where sometimes the focus tends to stray to “what is not done” instead of “what so many have done”. Yet they have not stopped being here for us all.
In recognition of our New Year, I would like to dedicate this news release to those who never give up, who decided to contribute through actions and who directly kept the dream of H-Hour alive throughout 2016 AND are still volunteering their time in 2017. Over the years many have come and gone but these hearty folks are still here giving of themselves to us all:
- Our Community Development Team who work days, nights and weekends to bring us game fixes along with new and improved content. Even releasing hotfixes over the holiday period: ` Fred, Jason, Rick, Rosie and Self
- Our Community Workshop Map Makers who continue to answer the call for SOCOM remakes and original content. These creative artists quietly help support and promote H-Hour with great maps for everyone to play: ` Wolf, Vice President, Self, Mr_Q_Blaze, PurpleUrkel, PoisonCobra, Newybond, Mojoe, Hype, Harry62, GRRRT, Fatalis, Camo
- Our Support Staff, all proud members of the community who give of their time to answer questions, handle tickets or manage the community on the web or steam forums as well as on social media sites. `Mikfail, PaulDPearl, Spazz Brown, RILL, tconscout
- Our 2017 Community Dev Testers who answer the call for testing on short notice and get online to test out all our many patches, including during the holiday period: ` Vice President, tconscout Spazz Brown, Pec1468, PaulDPearl, Partnur MUNKYSTOMPU, droidekaP59, AlphaMale
- Special mentions of community members who have and continue to go above and beyond, organizing events like Friday Night Fights, creating tutorials for mappers, running streams or just managing important information threads on our forums to promote community involvement: `Evil, Mojoe, Vice President
To those who came before these fine folks but are no longer involved, I want to also thank you for your efforts. To our players and bug reporters, thank you too--the game is alive and kicking because of you. There are just too many who have contributed over the year to mention so forgive me if I missed anyone.
I hope you will all join me now in making 2017 the year we focus on the positive things that await us because of the strength and passion of our community. Together we can make this the best year ever for H-Hour!
Patch News:
The dev team released a full patch and three hotfixes since our last News December 5th. These patches included first and second pass content for KnockBack animations and coding, release of the newly retextured Connor character, changes to engine settings to improve graphics for players and eliminate map “popping”, more work on controllers in our quest to fully support these devices and a long list of bug fixes, including some long-standing irritants like fixing an inconsistent crosshair for FPV/TPV that was causing blood splatter discrepancies.
This month for the Development Team:
Our Map Maker is busy creating props and continuing to fine tune map 5. Plans are for him to provide a test version of the map to Production so it can be loaded into the engine and internal testing begin before the end of the month.
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2016pics/content/CoveProps_update.jpg]
Our 3D Artist is continuing to improve on our texture sets for our game characters and do some prop texturing for map 5. You will see large improvements on the characters. He is also working closely with Production on engine import to minimize sizemaps and manage graphic settings between the tools.
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2016pics/content/Updated_Serbian.jpg]
Our Programmer is working on a surprise feature for the community, squashing more bugs and working with the Animator on content. He likes surprises so we never know everything that will turn up in a patch.
Our Animator has been working flat out in Maya correcting some model issues or missing elements we needed for our characters prior to the retexturing and working on additional skeleton and animation fixes for the game.
The team are working towards introducing a new testing process for the game. News on this will be released separately this month once the process is in place.
Given the short month, we are targeting a late month patch release.