Posted on Behalf of SOF Studios, President - Tom
Hello H-Hour community!
We hope you all enjoyed the weekend. We ran a free weekend on Steam, giving people who have never played the game an opportunity to try it out for themselves. This was a great promotion because Steam free weekends automatically place the game in everyone’s library who has not yet purchased the game—it helps to spread the word on H-Hour and gives us a chance to see what the typical gamer thinks of H-Hour and what improvements or priorities should be considered as we move forward with development. For example, we had staff in game watching the comings and goings and it is apparent the brutal nature of a one-lifer game like H-Hour makes it difficult for new players to adapt and feel comfortable. This tells us we need to look into developing our respawn mode feature to provide new gamers with a place they can learn the map routes, strategies and weapons before engaging with our more experienced players.
On Friday we released a new patch. In this patch, one of the major focuses was beginning the work on optimizing the game to run better on lower end machines. The results varied a bit. Our development testers conducted a series of tests with 1920 x 1080 resolution and the highest graphic settings to determine the results. Computers were getting between 5 to 20 percent frame boost at certain areas on Sismis. On Factory, some of our testing has been yielding up to 40 percent boosts in performance. With this patch, some of the file sizes did increase and loading times have also increased.
This is our first pass on optimization. There is still some additional things we are looking into to squeeze some more performance out of Sismis and Wolf Run that will be addressed at a later date. The next Unreal 4 Engine update is reported to include some things that will help us further improve optimization.
We have also added breakable lights. Not everything is (or will be) breakable in the game. They are mostly going to be at tactical locations. Lights that are required to see in a room will be made unbreakable.
As always, check out the patch notes here and join in the conversation.
This weekend we were pleased to release some first look images of our fourth map, to tentatively be released in September.
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2015pics/map/jungle1.jpg]
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2015pics/map/jungle2.jpg]
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2015pics/map/jungle3.jpg]
[img=https://sofstudios.com/Art2015/2015pics/map/jungle4.jpg]
This week’s development priorities will be to add some new models into Factory and fill up some of the empty rooms. The team will also still be working on some optimization to get additional performance boost out of the game.
Today is the last day of PAX PRIME and includes some H-Hour play from the Intel booth from 10am-2pm PST. I look forward to seeing many of you on the servers during the event.