I can give a picture of my view on the years of the mod.
When FH was released the mod was rather late compared to others. Desert Combat had been released before and had attracted all the players. Besides this, other mods from Merciless Creations and XWWII were already available. In order to play maps like Bocage from XWWII you had to wait for the map to be hosted, hoping for a bunch of players to jump on as the server was usually rather empty. Often the number of player raised from 4 to 17 within no-time when the map came up. The highest player number could be reached late in the european evening, when the european players were still awake and the players in the U.S. started gaming. With ASE allowing to shift quickly between different mods when browsing, people where lurking during these hours.
As mentioned before, during this time FH was released. The mod was late, but promised to be matured due to the very high version number (0.5b) and the size of the download. In my rememberance the first server to host FH was WolfGaming.net. The evil foods were admining and playing on the server every day. With their superior skill they promised fascinating battles each night. Many of the people that started playing in these days, like Dago Red, formed the later staff at Wolfgaming.net that led the server through the following years. Player numbers rised after 10 PM european time to a climax until 12 PM or 1 AM. If I remember right the first server had 32 or 34 slots.
What made the mod different from others was the hugh amount of customization. While other mods had only exchanged textures and tweaked view distance or damage system, FH had developed a unique damage system, had increased the number of different vehicles per map, had an increased view distance, provided new maps and statics, new vehicles and had tweaked ground combat by changing damage caused by handguns. On top of that new seats had been implemented to tanks to be manned by soldiers seeking for transport.
All these tweaks caused computers of most people to lag. Increased view distance, additional codes for the armory, a bunch of soldiers stacking in a single vehicle. Gladly the moving speed of tanks was reduced, which gave our crappy computers a chance to compensate.
During this time Intel had made a revolutionary step raising the clockspeed to new heights. Without this large jump ahead in processing capabilities the requirements for processing FH properly would not have been fullfilled by the average Home PC in the near upcoming future. But the new Intel P4 processors and the upcoming AMD counterparts were powerfull enough to handle this. This allowed also to raise slot numbers from the intitial 32 slots to 56 slots for FH 0.7. Excessive tests had shown that the server build was never stable enough to provide 64 slots. Wolfgaming.net hosted FH on a windows server that tended to crash when raised to the max. Most likely still today Linux servers prove to be better and more stable for hosting FH.
In my rememberance the weeks and month after the release of 0.5b were a happy time. Within short intervals of probably a single month hotfixes were released that also unlocked content that had come with the large installer of 0.5b. Though rather small, the hotfixes provided awesome tweaking and new content.
The latest of these hotfixes was 0.5e.
By the release of the latest fix a community had been formed whose patience was put to test right away. We were waiting 9 long month for the release of 0.6. Meanwhile the world moved on. Desert Combat lauched releases like fireworks and other mods were not hesitating as well.
This was also the time when a custom mapping community was formed. After about 6 month of waiting for 0.6 a mappack was available, providing 8 new maps. I think none of these maps were bummers. The mappers had just tried to serve the need of the community for new maps and stuff. All of these maps had poor gameplay, but the capability to tease. They were hosted on FH@Wolfgaming.net. For example, we had a map with a panther in it. I think it was the early A model, and it was implemented even without textures as the textures were not contained in 0.5, but the model was. Thus it was used.
These maps proved to be a dump starter after some time. The quality of gameplay was below any grade, thus driving players away in masses. At some point we were not able to fill the servers to the max any longer. Players stayed away. Though small, the community carried on, playing, providing a place to test the game for fresh people under conditions that allowed at least testing with a very limited amount of players.
But our patience was rewarded with the release of 0.6. Though FH was still a construction site, with roadworks in every part of the battlefield. Pacific, eastern Front, Africa, everything was kept together with duct tape. Prior to the realease of 0.6 FH was able to annouce another bummer. The team had decided to co-operate with Merciless Creations. The philosophy of Merciless was an open community that shared all content to provide a single ultimate mod. However, many of the things to come happened in the dark, for the average player not to be seen. However, Merciless Creations had focussed mainly on tweaking textures, sounds and rather easy stuff. Complicated codeworks did not appear to be their métier.
It seems like Merciless had worked on tweaking the pacific scenario, providing reworked maps like Wake and others for the FH team. However, something must have happened and even before the realease of 0.6 the cooperation had ended again. I think an agreement was made that the cooperation had ended, but FH was allowed to use the stuff from merciless for their 0.6 release.
Shortly after the release of 0.6 new trouble arised on the horizon. Though cooperation had ended with an agreement, some guy named Gunslinger had enlisted as a developer both for Merciless Creations and FH. What came to light was that Gunslinger had taken soundfiles from Merciless Creations, offering them to the FH team as his creations. Thus they were used for the pacific scenarios in 0.6. But now Merciless Creations asked for the stuff to be locked, and with the hotfix of 0.61 some pacific maps like wake island were locked again, not to re-appear until 0.65, 0.66 or even 0.7. I don't remember exactly.
The release of 0.6 also raised requirements for hardware. If played on servers above 32 slots, the requirements of physical Memory (RAM) and CPU power raised exponentially if you wanted decent and acceptable framerates. Thus many players had to upgrade their memory from 512MB to at least 640MB, as the game was hungry for hardware. During this time many players upraded to 1024 MB, though prices were almost exorbitant.
However, with the release of 0.6, FH became more famous. I think progress over at Desert Combat ceased at this time and players started to focus on other things. My rememberance of the time between 0.6 and 0.7 is a bit blurry. Well, at least I think that 0.6 was advertised in several gaming mags while the installer was provided on the magazine DVDs. The german gaming TV show Giga-games made a feature about FH, playing the actual version live on TV. Due to the sheer size of the installer you could also order a DVD per mail, provided and produced by the staff of warumdarum for the cost price. If I remember right EA/Dice made an end to this, thus it did not happen for later releases. But the DVD cover might still be around somewhere on the net.
After the release of 0.6 especially other european communities besides Wolfgaming.net hosted successfully servers for FH. Among them were Hslan and FragThe.Net. At this time FH was succcessful enough to provide a large amount of players on both sides of the atlantic to fill servers during the european peaks besides Wolfgaming.net.
But FH devs kept us waiting and waiting for new releases, thus thining out the playerbase after some time after each release. FH is a game that plays best with high player numbers, on full servers. Accordingly the action focussed on the core community servers after some time again, and the server over at Wolfgaming.net was the old bull in the scene providing low pings even for european players. There were more reasons leading to the decline of other servers that would go beyond the scope of this topic, like latency and spawn delays. Just on a sidenote: No server with a spawn delay of 10 seconds ever could keep ground among the community constantly.
During the development of FH years went by, and I can say that I was more than once pissed and frustrated about the intervals between releases. But at that time we did not know what would be coming when we waited 2 years for the release of FH2 0.1. During those two years the community went through ups and downs beyond any believe.
I guess I could write much more, but let me end my review at this point. Everything here is recalled from my memory, thus there might be mistakes. Please correct me if you find mistakes.
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