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• DH Interview
• Section 1 - Past
• Section 2 - Present
• Section 3 - Future

DH Interview¶

Section 1 - Past¶

• Most people playing Red Orchestra already know the Darkest Hour mod, certainly fewer know the people behind it. Could you introduce yourself a little and your position in the modteam?
  • Exocet I am the longest serving existing member of the DH team. I joined as a mapper in November 2006 after making 2 maps for RO:Ost. At the time there were 3 other members. 

I had to teach myself rigging, animation and some modelling in order to help the team. I became the mod lead when the other leads left the team after Beta 2 was released.
  • Psycho Ch!cken I joined the team after offering to fix their forum for them in June 2008, about a week before the beta 1 release. I got admin rights, fixed the forums as promised, and was then privy (unintentionally I'd say) to discussions regarding a major CTD bug.

They couldn't fix the bug and were about the throw in the towel so I told them to say nothing publicly and got them to give me their source code and helped fix the problem and prepare a patch.

After that I was only intending to fix a couple of bugs here and there to help out, but the then-programming lead went AWOL and as the only person who actually knew how to code, I got the job by default, despite not wanting it at the time. I am now the programming lead.
  • Nestor Makhno I had made a map or two before joining Carpathian Crosses as an LD – I also did some of the sounds. I got a lot of good experience there about how a mod should run reasonably effectively.

I had always got on well with Exo since before either of us joined a mod team so, when CC fizzled out, I offered to join the DH team and help them get ready for Steam release.

My role involved tidying up the maps, setting up a version control system that we could use to effectively update the mod regularly and setting up a more rigorous testing regime.

Nowadays I am not so involved in the mod any more though I still let them use my server and take part in testing.

• How do you rate the progress the team made since the beginning? Are there many members still the same or is it coming and going?
  • Exocet well I am happy with the progress of the mod. It could have been better publicised on first release, but overall I feel happy with the success of it. In hindsight things could have gone a lot better and made it possibly more successful but we were all learning at that time.

I am the only original guy left, then Sturt, many have come and gone, but we have had a good loyal and dedicated team now for the past nearly 2 years. There have been, in all, several dozen contributors over the years.

• What were the worst decisions in the mod in the past?
  • Exocet Probably the worst decision I can think of is the previous coder’s decision to reduce the resolution of all the in-game textures for our first release.
  • Nestor Makhno From my point of view, the worst thing about previous builds was the large number of not especially high quality or well-optimised maps. There were also several maps that were BSP hell-holes.

• What about the best decisions?
  • Exocet Press-ganging Sturt! (Psycho Ch!cken)
  • Nestor Makhno LOL – I was going to say “allowing Sturt free rein to work on the bullet snap and suppression effects.”

  • Psycho Ch!cken Having the subversion system as a way of streamlining the work has been a great help.

  • Nestor Makhno Yeah, thanks Flo!

• Do you think the new steam works system allows mods to reach a greater audience?
  • Psycho Ch!cken Definitely. With such a huge potential audience, the exposure is unlike anything else we could get. Our traditional fan-sites have done a great job for us in the past, but 7 million potential players is something we can't ignore. Tripwire arranged for us to have a 7 day "spotlight" on the main Steam storefront at release, which surely brought new faces, and just being on Steam gives us a "legitimacy" we wouldn't otherwise have.

Section 2 - Present¶

• DH is certainly the most successful mod for RedOrchestra. Are you happy with your success or would you have expected more?
  • Nestor Makhno I would say most people in the mod were relieved to get the steam release out. As there was no real measure of what the mod wanted when the project started 4 years ago it is hard to define 'success' but...
  • Psycho Ch!cken ...but, to be an officially recognised Steam mod blows all original expectations out of the water so, yes, I’d say we’re happy.

  • Exocet Well from my standpoint, our first release had over 10000 downloads in the first 12 hours, then our steam release broke that so, yes, I think we are happy and I wasn't expecting as many players as we have had.

• Is your focus for the next update on adding new content or polishing existing features/content?
  • Nestor Makhno About 50/50.
  • Psycho Ch!cken Yeah, about that.
  • Nestor Makhno Certainly Shurek has done a great job revamping all the armour code.
  • Exocet For sure. He has turned the tanking system on its head since he joined and it is far more successful now.

• Do you plan to add more game-play changing features like the already implemented suppression in the upcoming release?
  • Nestor Makhno Sturt doesn’t like us talking about his stuff until he’s 110\ happy with it but I think we can hint that shortly there probably will be a new feature of the same magnitude as suppression.
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  • Exocet I would say bigger.
  • Psycho Ch!cken Yes, there's something coming that we think will be a game changer on par with the suppression, but we're not saying what it is just yet. We'll be officially announcing it soon though, so keep an eye on our forums for updates.
  • Exocet There will also be six new maps, some of which have improved upon Schutze Sepp’s original spawn-room concept. Two of the maps are La Monderie and Freyneux; which are big tank/CA maps by Jeff Duquette. There are also La Chapelle and Noville (by Razorneck) as new infantry maps alongside a revamped version of Sichartshofen’s Hurtgenwald and, finally, there is a totally rebuilt version of Dog Green. 

As regards weapons and tanks, there is the C96, coloured smoke grenades, the M36 Jackson and a Pz IIIN – all of which should be in the next release.

• Is DH a competitive mod in your opinion, any plans on extending features for the competitive community?
  • Exocet Well I think we could improve the competitive side of the mod and will be looking into some new things after this release.
  • Nestor Makhno We work closely with 29th ID on a lot of our testing and they often produce mutators which may be of use to the competitive community.


• Is DH still a mod for RO? Or did it evolve into something else?
  • Nestor Makhno ‘Is DH still a mod for RO?’ – short answer, “yes”.


  • Nestor Makhno Long answer, “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssss”.


  • Psycho Ch!cken Heh – Yeah, without RO, DH would not exist.

Section 3 - Future¶

• RO:HoS seems to be coming up eventually. What are the plans for the Darkest Hour team then?
  • Psycho Ch!cken No plans are set in stone as yet. Let’s just wait for HoS to be released, then... who knows?

  • Exocet We are still concentrating on the work in hand on the current DH, we have some ideas but nothing has been formalised as such yet.

• Any thing you are particularly forward to with the new RO feature wise? Something that allows for new features you always wanted to add?
  • Nestor Makhno Having lived there for 3 years, I want to see Stalingrad done justice. So I have some fears about how TW will depict it. There were RO maps that looked like places in Russia, like Basovka and...erm.. that's all, and many that didn't look like anywhere but the imagination of someone living in the US who doesn’t have a passport.

That’s from a visual point of view. Other than that, I generally trust TW’s judgement on matters of gameplay and so on so I expect that to be at least good.

  • Psycho Ch!cken Hard to say until more information has been released. We still don't know the full extent of the features being added, so I can't really make a judgement just yet.

• How do you rate the "arcadey" aspects shown in the shakeycam vids of the alpha build?
  • Nestor Makhno I can’t say I remember it being too arcadey from what I saw – then again I was mostly looking at the environments. And being blinded by the lights reflected off of John’s hair.

  • Psycho Ch!cken It was a pre-alpha build, so jumping to conclusions at this point would just be silly. If it were a beta build sure, but pre-alpha (emphasis on "pre")... not that I can remember what "arcadey" stuff was in it.

• Anything that would mean a showstopper for you? Anything that would prevent you from playing or even buying RO:HoS?
  • Nestor Makhno For me, anything that is disrespectful to any of the armies that took part in the battle would stop me buying straight away. I want to see no treatment of any side like ‘Orc Hordes’ to be mown down. So insufficient respect to the participants, history or the city itself, basically.


  • Psycho Ch!cken I can’t see TW doing any one thing that would be a show-stopper. I highly doubt I would not buy the game.

  • Exocet The only thing I am concerned about is the vehicles.