Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
This past week the team has been heavily focused on identifying the underlying causes with some long standing bugs in our game modes and audio systems. All issues were traced back to origin—the original builds where the problem began--so those builds could be reviewed to determine the most likely causes. This exercise has been very useful in deciding how best to move forward with fixes.
We are now aware there are three separate fixes that are required. Two relate directly to UE4 engine code—parent/child association loss of connection when blueprint revisions are made to a child AND an audio interface that is severely limited and can cause voice pool overflow. The last bug relates to Microsoft DirectX coding for a legacy audio driver that is still in use, DX 9.C. This has been a long standing Microsoft audio bug but is particularly unstable with Windows 10 when combined with certain user audio drivers. Microsoft has released a fix and all of these bugs, including the DirectX one are reported to be corrected in the newest versions of the UE4 engine. Knowing this allowed the team to map the best path to take forward for fixing those issues players were experiencing.
While the dev team has focused on this, the map making community is continuing to create new content for everyone. Our monitors have been very busy reviewing maps and working with the creators to get fixes into their content. The level of cooperation I see in all these groups coming together to help build something bigger and better for the H-Hour community is amazing.
What’s Ahead?
- The team is now investigating the potential for a move of our source code to a newer version of the engine. Upgrading brings many benefits but much work as all code must be reviewed to ensure it works within the newer engine processes and any deprecated code functions must be rewritten. The team feels now is the best time for this review given already identified shortcomings and bugs within 4.8.3. Upgrading also offer many enhanced tools for the developers and more options for players. Once we know where our intended end state is, we will provide more details for you on these gains. In the interim, we ask for your patience as it is time consuming, tedious work.
- While we wait we will be looking at how we can best change up the servers to bring some diversity to the gameplay for everyone.
- Last week we spoke about the “alternate” funding platform (NO NOT XBOX) to get H-Hour in front of some folks. I have a call later today to see if we are a good fit. I’ll inform you all how that call goes and the specifics of what I find out.
All I can say is the H-Hour community rocks and I love to see the level of involvement from so many of you. Let’s continue to support our great group of volunteers as they help us improve our day to day gameplay experience. Don’t forget to give your feedback to the Workshop map creators and vote for your favorites. Keep posting and suggesting how we can improve the server experience and reporting bugs. Together we will keep things moving forward.
More next Monday…..