Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios President, Tom
Hello, H-Hour Community!
We hope you all had a good Easter weekend with friends and family.
A couple development updates:
The redevelopment of the WorkshopApp for H-Hour reached a major milestone this past week and now sits at 50% complete. Because of the level of interest in our Workshop and the desire for its release, we are presenting a more detailed explanation of the work itself than is our norm. We have tried to use layman's language in how we describe the work but please forgive us if this seems more technical than our usual information releases. It is a complex build and needs careful construction to ensure we have a fully functioning and sustainable WorkshopApp that also provides for future potential for additional community interaction with our game content.
So, last week we were able to implement full communication and feedback functions between the Valve Workshop back end, the existing H-Hour uploaded Workshop files and our WorkshopApp. This allows for the pulling and display of Valve's reporting of statuses as well as the refresh of status information displayed while in our App. During the beta, the lack of this reporting function meant numerous manual workarounds had to be used to prevent map creators (who had no visual feedback on whether their request was received) from continually spamming requests, overloading the process and potentially corrupting files. Jason was able to achieve this by implementing multi-threading in UE4 specifically for our WorkshopApp. H-Hour game requests now resides on a separate thread while the requests to Valve for reporting of statuses and refresh commands resides on separate threads. We also added locks to various UI interface elements once a request is underway to prevent users from spamming conflicting requests.
From the map creator’s perspective, you’ll see onscreen dynamic status text when the new WorkshopApp is completed and released. These statuses are coded to fade in and out to draw user’s attention to the fact an action is underway. For example, if an information request is processing, they will see "Please Wait". If an upload request, depending on the current status, they will see "Uploading" or "Upload in Process" status text. The status text itself is set by Valve in the function call to enable the "wait" state that was successfully added to our App.
In addition to the multi-threading, reporting and wait state improvements, our beta map creators Published apps and Subscribed content is now enabled, populated and displayed to them for ease of use. This allows them to unsubscribe/re-subscribe to workshop content from our App's interface and allows them to begin the "create steam workshop items" process (creating the new content ID and refreshing the display to show this ID). These two additions address beta mapper requests to simplify the management and creation of their workshop content.
Next up is what will be the biggest challenge, building the entire UI for "managing" the item before submission to Valve. That means entry of the item name, description, preview image, and the all-important.... content file validations to be performed prior to allowing an upload. This will present our Workshop to users in a polished state and remove the risk to public game files from incorrect file structures existing in uploads.
Funding update:
Last week you guys may recall a gentleman reaching out to us on Twitter saying he’d take a look at H-Hour. I did contact him and we talked for a little bit. From the conversation he was kind enough to give an email introduction to a publisher who he thought might be interested in helping us. It turned out that H-Hour wasn’t a good fit for their pipeline and that they enjoyed our game. This is common. I’ve spoken with a lot of folks, as of late, and the majority have interest in other genres. A tactical shooter is a tough market for sure but not impossible. We just have to find the right fit. Is it frustrating? Heck ya it is. We’re so very close to completing H-Hour,,,, We just need that extra bit of assistance.
We do have another follow up call this week and some other smaller opportunities. I’ll continue my efforts on my end and I appreciate everyone continuing to do all they can for H-Hour.
Thank you all so very much.
More next Monday!