Hello H-Hour community!

This is a very exciting and important week for the studio. As most of you know, tomorrow (Tuesday, May 19, 2015) is our launch date on Steam. That means that tomorrow our game will launch via Early Access and the general public will be able to purchase, download and play this early build of our game. This is the first opportunity that the general public has had to see and play the game. Steam Early Access is a major milestone for H-Hour: World's Elite and we are very happy to have made it here with the help of all of you.

This morning we sent out the early access keys to all community members who donated during one of our early campaigns (i.e. Kickstarter or Bake Sale) at a tier that included "a digital copy of the game on PC." Everyone in this group who had not selected a platform was sent an email this past month to do so. So if you selected PC, you should have received your key this morning. If you believe you are in this group but cannot find your email, please check all your email accounts (i.e. the email address associated with your donation via PayPal) as well as your junk or spam folder. If you are certain you should have received a key and you did not, please email us at office@sofstudios.com and we will help.

(Please note that we are no longer accepting switches from PS4 to PC for game platform. If you selected PS4 for your platform, you were automatically marked down for that platform and will receive your key when we launch on console. Thanks!)

If you redeem your key today, Steam will accept it but give you a message that the game is not yet released. Tomorrow on launch, your game will become active so you can join in the fun. We just wanted to make sure the keys went out early, giving you all the chance to receive them.

In other housekeeping news, we had two contests on the website wrap up this past week. Today we announce the winners of the Beta Screenshot contest. This contest we broken down categorically.

The first category was Funniest Shot and Ezra23 won here for an unusual sight: http://i.imgur.com/d39Nkdq.jpg

The second category, Best Action Shot (with the most competition) was won by platinumb1: http://i.imgur.com/IdGTsiS.jpg

LyonKnyght dominated the third category, Most Beautiful Shot, for a great shot showing off the game: http://i.imgur.com/vUDVSNd.jpg

Finally, we had Best Overall Shot in which pictures from any category were illegible. Platinumb1 won again in this category with his great action shot.

Thanks to everyone who participated and congratulations to the winners! Ezra23 and LyonKnyght will both be receiving H-Hour T-shirts. Platinumb1 will be getting a shirt and an H-Hour hat. Thanks guys!

Last week we also unveiled the winners for our secret third beta competition. We kept track of the number of qualified bug reports submitted by beta team members. We were looking for the beta members who submitted the greatest quantity and quality of bug reports throughout the beta period. We wanted to honor our Bug Reporting superstars, whose efforts will go a long way towards helping to create a better game for everyone. We didn't want potential prizes to be any sort of a factor and thus the secrecy of the contest.

In third place, with 11 qualified bug reports, was iSpeZz. He will be receiving an H-Hour T-shirt. Great job!

In second place, with 18 qualified bug reports, is EagleF15. He will be receiving an H-Hour T-shirt, hat and patches. Great bug squashing!

And coming in first with a total of 24 qualified bug reports is BadContrakt! For his first place finish, BadContrakt will be receiving a GAEMS Vanguard Personal Gaming Environment.

Thank you to all of our great bug reporters throughout the testing process. The development team is very grateful for your hard work!

In terms of development of the game, the devs put up a major update on Friday which added a number of new things to the game, including:

• This patch delivers a fully functioning demolition mode, significant changes to maps to address community concerns as well as the new game mode, polish, optimizations to graphics and networking for both client and server side and a large number of bug closures.
  
• Supply port with IP when accepting game invites so players can connect to the server instance
  
• Animations for demolition-- animations for bomb pickup, plant, set, defuse
  
• Code, Actions, sounds and new models for demo mode
  
• Added doors to terrorist camp on WolfRun and built out interior of building to use for demo
  
• New building added to WolfRun across from center building to house initial bomb location.
  
• Moved terrorist camp on WolfRun, a lot of terrain sculpting, tree moving, terrain painting, audio moving and power line re-routing to improve game flow, light changes to reduce fog glare
  
• Changes to Sismis to counteract the spawn to spawn line of sight issue, new routes, modified road, wider building near enemy spawn, better lighting, many more distant trees and mountains
  
• Adjusted mip distance on objects to prevent blurriness
  
• Graphic optimizations to improve client performance and visuals; dynamic lighting rendering distances adjusted, settings adjusted
  
• Server optimizations – improves networking and instructions sent to and from clients so we should see improvements in registration/performance for clients as well
  
• Bug fixes for bullets, hit registry, blood splatter (see bugs below)
  
• Menu and options updates, fixes and some key reassignments to fix previous bugs/issues
  
• New terrorist character released for testing

More updates to come in the upcoming weeks. Thank you for all of your support and we hope to see many of you playing the game on Steam tomorrow!

Green Up![www.sofstudios.com]