Hawken
PC Sunset Announcement
It’s been an incredible journey since the introduction of Hawken on Steam, back in 2014. The game’s
success has been largely due to your continuous support. The Hawken community has been the
cornerstone of this ever-evolving franchise.
After 3 great years, we are shutting down the PC Steam servers to refocus our development efforts. The
PC game will officially be removed on January 2, 2018, and all DLC and purchasable content will also be
unavailable starting today.
It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience working alongside such a dedicated PC player base. Your
feedback and support has been invaluable to us, and the team looks forward to creating more great
games based on what we’ve learned from you.
Thank you all very much for your support!
The Hawken Team
PC Update Soft Launch Period
We're rolling out the PC relaunch update as you may have seen. This is *not* the final version of the PC relaunch update and everything is subject to change. This is a soft launch period that will last a bit of time, and I stress that this is not the final version of the game. There will be lots of bugs, and we will be fixing them as soon as we can. Expect several patches this week and the weeks to follow.
Please post any feedback you have regarding the softlaunch on the official Hawken forums or the Hawken Steam forums. We will be working hard with the community on fixing issues that may arise in both the community-run Discord server the official forums, the Steam forums, as well as customer support.
Thanks for supporting us, and we'll see you ingame.
CZeroFive
Dev Update (from 2/23/2017)
We would like to apologize for not posting on Steam in such a long time.
The game is still in development, and the future is bright for Hawken. We are working to deliver the next PC update. It has been about two years since the last update, and we are really excited to get a new one out!
We would like to show you one of the previous developer updates, which shows some of the features you can expect from the PC update slated for 2017. These features and content are currently on the Xbox One and PS4 versions of Hawken and will make their way to PC as well as all previous console updates.
Click here to read the full Dev Update on PlayHawken!
Thank you for your continued support of Hawken!
Dev Update - Q&A
Dev Update - Catching Up! Coming Soon - PS4 & Xbox One!
Ever wondered just what was going on for the past year or so? We figured a high level timeline might be of interest :)
The long and short of it is that the console port is a fantastic addition to Hawken. It brings the gameplay we all love to a very wide audience, and we’ve all kinds of good plans for the future. The PC platform is going see all kinds of benefits; we’re in the process of getting all platforms up to feature parity, and from that point on, the Illal sky is the limit.
March 2015 – Reloaded Games acquires Hawken assets
This was the big rescue-style emergency recovery action to make sure Hawken didn’t disappear.
June 2015 – Console port starts to ramp up
505 Games happened to notice when we acquired the Hawken assets. They pretty quickly mentioned they thought a console port would make a lot of sense, and so after some negotiation time and some exploratory research, an agreement was signed that put Hawken on the road to becoming a console title. Prior to then, we had to sort of remain in a bit of a holding pattern, because depending on the possible console port work, the nature of immediate development efforts would have been drastically different. This is probably when you may have noticed capnjosh becoming a little less-than-precise in his communications ;)
July 2015 – Initial code merge for PlayStation 4 port
This involved merging some 26,000 files. I'm sure you can imagine how mind-numbing that can be. Our tech director had done this a number of times before, so when he finished, the game was surprisingly close to running. Things generally compiled, but, as you can guess, it becomes a hugely painful process of addressing every compilation problem, adding more logging, iterating, and generally going into super-focus mode for hours and hours and days and days. If you don’t mind doing that, then, well game dev may be for you.
August 2015 – First raw PlayStation builds
This phase took the longest, since it had to set things up to work with the upcoming Xbox One merge. It also was where we had to also port the Hawken-specific online subsystems; this proved to pretty time-consuming on its own. All throughout, we made sure it ran on PC, which helped with testing overall, and it also allowed for faster dev work for the rest of the team.
September 2015 – Xbox One code merge and first builds
During this process we had to upgrade to DirectX 11. We had to merge 3 different rendering pipelines into one so future development could be faster.
October 2015 – Significant playable builds for console. UI starts to become a challenging little beast
Here’s where the development started to get interesting. Talk about complex.
November 2015 – UI proves to be far more of a problem than anticipated.
The problem essentially boiled down to pretty old tech debt. The UI code had had to be structured to handle a lot more than ActionScript 2 was really well-suited to handle, so there were added layers of complexity that made work very slow for people unfamiliar with all the context behind where and why things were coded the way they were. Clean, well-engineered code, yes, but very complex.
December 2015 – Started a UI rebuild; winter illness
The idea behind this was that we could not get satisfactory console controller input. Shifting focus between all the elements on the existing UI was proving near impossible. So, we sort of had no choice but to try rebuilding a new UI framework using all the experience of past console port work and current best practices. This process was very time consuming, and I’m sure our publisher can emphasize how worrisome it all was ;)
January 2016 – Revert to old UI with help of original U programmer; framerate gets better
Out of nowhere, Jay Elwanger happened to become available. He knew how and why code was the way it was and he loved Hawken. He was able to do a proof-of-concept UI update that indicated we did not have to scrap the entire old UI. This work allowed us to put focus back on the engine-specific porting work.
February 2016 – Services layer updates, continue UI, reschedule launch dates
We upgraded frameworks for the back-end services, we improved handling, created all the server-to-server communications systems required for console authentication and purchases. Kind of a complex bundle of things there, let me tell ya. Good thing is it’s all fairly reusable and pretty clean.
March 2016 – More services updates, hosting and deployment adjustments
The services layer saw upgrades to things like processing efficiency, security, and compression of data in transit over the network. Hosting systems and the services layer had to updated to handle the now-multiple platforms per environment. Deployment systems, build servers, gameserver hosts, and services machines all saw changes. And all the while we had to keep in mind how we can ensure the live PC game is supported.
April 2016 – First certification checks on Xbox One
The Xbox team at Microsoft was excited to see Hawken on the Xbox One, and they actually did a few pre-certification reviews for us. And then they even had an expert do an analysis of some PIX captures. You know when you get to hear a true expert on some topic sort of explain what they’re seeing, what they suspect could be a cause, and then some historical background on why something could be happening? Yeah, there are some really smart people over at Microsoft.
May 2016 – First certification submissions, massive bug fixing
Having a game build in certification testing is nerve-wracking. You go for several days fearing the worst – dozens of Condition For Resubmission items (in Xbox parlance) or Must Fix items (in Play Station testing terms). The stakes are high at this point ; it takes a week or two from the time you do final commits for a build to when that build is done with submission testing. Getting fixes retested and approved can be that long plus the time it takes to find and fix the issues. It was in May that we lost someone who had become a great friend and huge Hawken supporter, Jay Elwanger. We were all stunned and we still miss him. He loved Hawken, and he poured some fantastic work into this game. I’m proud to have known him.
Summer 2016 – Launch, relaunch, and updates
There will undoubtedly be some cleanup and fixes required after the console launch, but during all that we will be preparing for the PC relaunch. Why didn’t we do the PC first? A commitment to launch the console version first and the desire to solidify that release before we tackle the task of making sure all the existing data in the PC game is handled right. We also have what we expect to performance improvements, a new patcher, and the new faster services layer. Most importantly, we have structured the project so that any development efforts apply across all platforms, so once we have all the platforms up to the same version, all future development should proceed in lock-step.
Future development targets, roadmap, and more will be released over the coming weeks.
We're happy to announce from E3 ....
Dev Update - 2015-11-13
Tasks completed since the last update:
[LIST="1"]
<*>UI work, particularly at the code level - it's well-done but pretty complex, so it's taking pretty long to digest.
<*>Hosting and parent domain updates for additional development environment In the future, we'll have everything under *.playhawken.com rather than *.meteor-ent.com.
<*>More engine-level work. DX11 anybody?
<*>Updates to the Meteor SDK to support some planned enhancements.
<*>Beginning work on the back-end to support better management of mech and weapon stats.
<*>Beginning work on 3d model exports and imports.
[/LIST]
Upcoming tasks:
[LIST="1"]
<*>More UI work
<*>Supporting a partner who may make an announcement as early as this week. So keep your Google news alerts tuned to Hawken :)
<*>Get the replacement game server host up for Ashburn. The Ashburn host was taken out a earlier than expected, so there will be about a week until the replacement will be ready
<*>Start to convert our DEV and Staged environments over to use the *.playhawken.com domain scheme
<*>Start work on creating new mech platforms This is the code-level stuff used by new mechs.
[/LIST]
War Wednesday Nov 11 - Weekly Missions Kick-off
As always, we'll meet up on the community teamspeak ~9:30pm EST: ts5.gameservers.com:9152
For map mods and custom games to request, observe a list of community favorites.
This week I am very excited to introduce weekly missions. This week's mission will be limited to a first-come first-serve basis due to limited prizes. Not all missions will be like this, some may be free-for-all or have teams register in the thread.
If this should go well and attendance supports it, future War Wednesday will feature territory warfare. Yes, I'll do the bookkeeping and all you pilots can steal imaginary land from each other.
https://community.playhawken.com/topic/3769-war-wednesday-nov-11-weekly-missions-kick-off-also-in-beta/
Ultra-Violent Wednesday | EU Community Event.
Pre-Party: from 19:00 to 20:00 GMT
Event Actual: from 20:00 to 22:00 GMT
After-Party : from 22:00 to --:-- GMT.
[IMG]http://img00.deviantart.net/1fce/i/2015/224/a/f/ultra_violent_wednesday_ad_by_neraste-d95ccz2.jpg