Posted on Behalf of SOF Studio President, Tom
Hello H-Hour Community!
Around the Studio:
The dev team are catching their breath while monitoring the stability of the game post upgrade to UE4 4.15; a major piece of work. With the great response from the community in providing dump files, they were able to quickly stabilize the game with three successive hotfixes being released last week. They are still monitoring servers, logs and community reports to determine when they can return to full development once again and what their focus for next patch should be.
Workshop and custom mappers are a huge part of what makes H-Hour great so a lot of time was devoted to upgrading the tools and guide for our community mappers. The devs are currently continuing to focus on working with the community mappers to support their bringing their workshop maps back for everyone. The team has assisted where needed in answering migration questions and will now begin testing the maps deemed ready and providing feedback so these custom maps make it into our DLC pack for the next patch. To date we have Catacombs (formerly Requiem) by Wolf, Black Vein by Harry62, RainForest by Newybond and upcoming fixes for Desert Raid by SelflessOne. Given the requests the team has had, I feel confident other maps are not far behind.
I want to personally thank our community dev team for all their hard work in putting this great patch together and the community mappers for once again stepping up to migrate their maps for everyone to enjoy! I also want to thank our loyal supporters on Twitter and Facebook, the Youtubers who made sure post-patch videos were produced, the streamers on Twitch and those promoting the game through forums and others sites. This community is amazing , full of passion and you all definitely deserve much recognition for your efforts on behalf of H-Hour. This truly is a community driven project!
Patch News:
I must say, although two months is a long time, the number of things that the team has produced in that period is quite impressive:
* Engine upgrade to 4.15
* Workshop tools upgrade and move of maps to DLC
* Animations (lots and lots of changes here!)
* New camos for all character models
* Claymores!!
* New security features
* Improved networking
* Gun tuning!!!?!?!?!
* Better overall graphics and optimizations
* Customizable crosshair sizing/color
* A TON of bug fixes
For more information on what was in the patch, check our patch notes.
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From the Development Team -- Fred talks Animations
Coffee Please?!
Hello all, Fred here.
First and foremost, I want to thank the entire H-Hour community for their continued support and patience while we went through this long update. The past two months have been full of sleepless nights and long days for the entire team so we could get this patch out to you guys, and I really hope that you enjoy what has been provided.
You saw our patch notes and heck, that is quite a large list for such a small team. For me, it has been a race to get in as much time and focus as possible on .... Animations! You know-that thing you all have been asking for over a very long time.
I think it is obvious that these last two months included a lot of work on the game animations. Most of the animations that were used in game previously were completely replaced in this process – the skeleton was (once again) revamped, many animations that were missing (strafing with guns down) were added, and any animation that wasn’t replaced was touched up at least a bit; some more than a bit.
Now when I say that EVERY animation in game was touched, I mean it. But before I go any further, I want to preface that almost every animation in game still needs to go through a cleanup process, but that will be saved for a later date – after more important things such as ladders and jump-to-climb are added in. So why don’t we all take a little trip through each of the core animations that are currently in the game and talk about them a little bit.
Jumps
Good old jumps. Jumps may be one of the most difficult things to make look “great” because of the way the mechanics need to be coded in game. If you break it down in your head there are three parts to a jump – the start, the in air, and the land. To make everything look good, each of these needs to be timed perfectly. In real life, you would jump differently if you were jumping down a hill, up a hill, or on flat ground. In a game, there isn’t a straightforward way of applying that logic to accurately reflect what would happen in real life, so we do our best.
To make things look as fluid as we could, we have introduced a variety of jumps. There are now eight different jumps in the game which correspond to movement (stationary or moving) and gun type and position (pistol or rifle AND relaxed or guns hot position). Using a combination of these jumps, we get an overall better-looking jump.
NOTE: There is still a small “float” in the jump that has been added because we don’t have a jump-to-climb mechanic YET. We didn’t want to impede movement around the map so we decided to give the player a little extra jump height. Once jump-to-climb is in, we’ll be lowering the jump height and the jump will be more fluid on a flat surface.
And Oh Yea! You can jump from crouch now.
Movement
A ton of work went into this. Virtually all the movement animations were replaced to allow for more fluid movement of the character. Further improvements are planned to be made to make the character move more freely, but I’ll touch on that in a moment.
We added a few things that were missing from the current movement system that we believed were extremely important to the fluidity of the character. First was the addition of animations for strafing. Before the patch, when you strafed side to side the character’s gun would go hot due to missing animations in the strafe area of the locomotion graph. With the implementation of the new animations, you will no longer go guns hot when strafing side to side….. unless an enemy is nearby. Second was a build out of the blendspacing; the part of the animation that lets all those movements come together in a fluid scene. People using a keyboard and mouse will not notice this change as they only have two options; running and walking. Controller players however will now notice when they push ever so slightly on their sticks, their character will walk even slower than the standard walk animation. Before when you walked slowly on a controller, your character would do a fast walk with the character’s feet sliding. Since this game is slated for console, I figured now was as good a time as any to add in that functionality.
Now although the character movement is smother after this patch, the character still looks a little stiff. Soon, we will be implementing the addition of aimoffsets to the character when in the idle position. Aimoffsets will allow the character to look around while stationary. This will add another level of freedom in character movement as the character’s feet won’t automatically move when you look left and right. Rather, the character will turn at the waist until it can’t turn anymore and then you will take a step. Most of the work has already been completed for this addition but some framework needs to be done to complete the process. This addition will hopefully rid us of the stiffness in the character.
Random Thoughts
A lot of other discrete animations have been added to make things more fluid, such as, leaning with a pistol, prone with a pistol, claymore planting, giving control back to the character sooner during the knock back animation, ectara, but you can see a lot of that in the patch notes and in game.
Many more things need to be added to improve fluidity to the game outside of the core gameplay functions. Some of these include having jumps based off speed and direction and adding new animations sets for when your character is holding a grenade instead of a pistol or rifle. And let’s not forget that hand IK! All this stuff will come in time, and I am excited to continue to work on making the gameplay as smooth as possible from my end.
What’s Next
Now that the framework has been cleaned up (once again thank you for your patience), we can move full steam ahead and work on those things you all have made clear are important to you. You know what I’m talking about, and those things are at the top of our priority list. To implement jump-to-climb and ladders, Jason and I need to work hard to make sure that the framework is set and the animations look great when applied. We want to make sure that what we give the community, although first pass, will show how passionate we, and the rest of the team, are about this project. We will be working hard to add in those core features in the coming months and in the mean time I will also be working to add in those other things mentioned above.
I hope you all enjoy the patch as much as I did when creating my portion of the work, and I hope that this discussion helped explain why you may still see oddities in the animations. Remember that this is all still a work in progress and I plan on touching these animations again to clean them up before we make that final push to a PS4 port.
Once again, thank you all for your continued support as we continue this journey to creating a game that has only been in our dreams until now. We will continue working on this project until we feel like it is complete and trust me when I say, we are our toughest critics.
Now go GREEN UP!
Fred