Howdy hunters,

Hope you are well on this glorious summer’s day. Here’s what has been happening at the Expansive Worlds’ Headquarters.

Game Crashes – Workaround Test

Here is some important information for those of you who have been experiencing issues causing the game client to crash. We’re hopefully starting to see some progress on the matter, thanks to the dedicated efforts of our awesome community members who’ve discovered and thoroughly tested the workaround. While we are testing it internally, you can try to implement it yourself following the instructions in this forum thread. Please read both the original post from caledonianblues as well as the post from our producer Philipp carefully, ask your questions and report your findings in that very same thread. We will be closely monitoring the data and once all testing is verified, we will build the solution and roll it out automatically for everyone.

Thanks again to our community members Pretty_Boy, Fletchette, caledonianblues and others who helped to test and roll this out to the larger community. You guys officially rock and we are humbled and honoured to have you playing with us! <3

Geek out on your hunting data!

Staying on the matter of impressive community efforts, make sure to check this sophisticated stats web app, developed by the aforementioned caledonianblues: https://www.uhcapps.co.uk/stats_lifetime.php?username=caledonianblues (just exchange “caledonianblues” in the URL to your own theHunter username to see your own stats). Search among your weapons, species, collectables, see some nice graphs of your hunting achievements and much, much more. Excellent work!

Semi-automatic wonderfulness

Yesterday we released another member of our semi-auto weapon family. The ultimate varmint equalizer, a .223 Semi-Automatic Rifle. From what we’ve gathered so far, the majority of you seem to like it, so that’s sweet! One of the common requests has been to expand the permitted species list by adding Sitka Deer (which by the way are getting a score upgrade in our next patch, don’t miss it). Our game designer Daniel is investigating this possibility, stay tuned for more news on this. If you want to see the rifle in all its glory, check out this video by our community member ronMctube:

Also, there is a nice bundle in the store right now with the new rifle, matching scope and a scent hound – have a look here.

Jambofinal is (almost) here

Our Football Jamboree 2016 is – alas – coming to an end. This Sunday is the last day when you can buy the “winning” t-shirt to secure that delightful 7mm Magnum Bullpup with gold engraving (it won’t be available in the store, ever), so place your bets and keep your fingers crossed for your favourite team to win. Following the requests from many players, we’re also releasing all the 32 national caps from theHunter Football Jamboree 2014. You can get them until the end of this week in our store.

New textures for old weapons

Recently we’ve been trying to show some love to our old content, and as part of this attempt we’ve given facelift and slight remodeling to our oldest (and arguably the least prettiest) rifles, the .243, .270 (wood), and .300 (composite) Bolt-Action Rifles. Go and check them in game to see the difference!

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hi hunters,

It’s going to be a short status update today as there’s not much news from this corner of the world. The backend and client programming team, together with Dennis our QA Manager, continue working on persistent bugs, issues and crashes. Improvements for “alt-tabbing” and further sound memory fixes are in testing. On Monday we released a patch with some fixes for things that broke last week, game crashes due to sound memory allocation problems, and the pheasant scoring issue.

The art team has started working on something new and cool and you can expect to hear more on this in future updates.

The quarterfinals of our Football Jamboree are starting today. There are only 8 teams (or eight t-shirts) left. The prices go up again on Monday, so be sure to make your t-shirt bet while they’re still at a low price!

Yesterday we released the .45 Long Colt Revolver, “The Mule”. If you want to see it in action, check out this video HooCairs made back in January.

Check out the Lock&Learn stream today at 16:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel. Johanna will be joined by our community champion caledonianblues as they travel to Whiterime Ridge in pursuit of the mighty bison!

Last but not the least, on Monday theHunter team be having some visitors from a TV studio, who will be filming some footage of theHunter. We will of course let you know the details, including the broadcasting time and channel afterwards.

That’s it for today folks, more news next week. Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Time for another status update from Expansive Worlds.

Server update

Many of you experienced interruptions and disturbed game performance on Tuesday, Wednesday and for a short time on Thursday. Our servers had been up and down due to our database responding to queries slower than usual. Our backend guys have been all hands on deck in the last days, streamlining queries and making the whole server-database communication more efficient. We are also working together with our server provider Google on getting to the bottom of the issue and at the same time improving the database performance. Our sincere apologies to everyone affected. Due to the service disruptions this week there was no new content released, but we are planning to resume the usual flow as soon as we can.

Additional attempts and new season

Since many of you have lost attempts in the Actual Football Event competition, we’ve added 10 additional ones. Also, as you might have noticed, the new 20th season started today. From now on, we are planning to make the season change more often and regular, you can expect to hear more details on this later.

Jamboree update

The Football Jamboree event is in full bloom. Don’t forget to buy the t-shirts before June 22nd, at the lowest possible price of 120 em$. The prices will double on June 23rd as we enter the Round of 16, so act fast. Also, today is the last day to get the bundle with all 24 T-Shirts at a super price. That Golden Bullpup is not going to win itself!

Lock & Learn

Yesterday Johanna was joined by our community member and a real Turkey connoisseur JackRbbt in pursuit after her first Turkey, notorious for being one of the trickiest species to hunt in theHunter. You can catch the recap of the livestream below. Please note that next week there will be no Lock&Learn due to the Swedish Midsummer, but if you want to join Johanna on one of her future streams – give her a shout!

Spot on HunterTalk

And finally, we wanted to share with you some news about our German community HunterTalk. It’s one of our oldest non-English communities and it’s still holding strong. The HunterTalk staff have recently made amazing work moving the forum onto a new platform and it looks great. Together with the new platform, new events, functions and tools were added. For our German speaking players, you can find more details in this post from the HunterTalk admin M9Chis. Waidmannsheil!

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Our weekly status update is back after a short break due to the action-packed dog release. Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Scent Hounds

For one, the scent hound release went really well and the whole team were super happy to read your comments showing that most people loved their new dogs and enjoyed their functionality. We have learned a lot from our first dogs, the retrievers, as well as excellent testing by our closed beta team which delivered great results. Thank you guys, you know who you are! Sadly, the server issues have rained on the parade. You can find an official statement and explanation from our producer Philipp here. Following the release, an increased amount of game crashes have also been reported, fixes for one of them is already included in today’s game update, please rest assured we continue working on that.

If the whole scent hound frenzy passed you by, be sure to check some videos so you know what all the fuss is about. Our community members ronMctube, Mills, Flinter have made some good ones, and also you can catch the recap of our official pre-release livestream with Pratze and Johanna.

We are also curious to hear what you think of your retrievers now that we’ve made some significant AI adjustments. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them more now. Anyway, test them and let us know.

The best classic rifle is chosen!

The hounds were the name of the game last week, so some of you might have missed the end of our much praised Classic Showdown event. It’s been a truly amazing event but the victory goes to the K98k Bolt-Action Rifle team, due to what was a trophy of a lifetime. A piebald elk scoring 421.261. Although my personal favourite rifle has won, I just want to say well done to everyone! Here are the results of all four team competitions, each of them is a great accomplishment in itself!

• Team 8×57 IS K98k
• Team 7.62x54R
• Team .30-06
• Team .303

We’re inspired by the success of this event and will probably make something similar for other weapon classes, where applicable.

Football Jamboree 2016

And now onto an event of a totally different caliber. Those of you who have been with us long enough, must remember our Football Jamboree 2014 and the super-exclusive Royal Shotgun. Well, it’s time for another jamboree, this time with a slightly European flavour 😉 But don’t worry, we’ve also prepared something for those of you who are not that involved in the grand sporting event kicking off in France tomorrow. Why yes, there will be another exclusive “golden” weapon and this time it will be one of our most popular rifles in theHunter. Read on!

Lock&Learn

Lock&Learn is back as well, and this week Johanna will be joined by our Lead Client Programmer Danny and they will take it to our all-time favourite, Whitehart Island, and try to perform a shot through the hart 😉 Make sure you join if you’re available. If you’ve read some of Danny’s posts in the forum, you can probably guess that it’ll be worthwhile.

Robin is back!

In one of our old status updates we told you the story of our programmer Robin who suffered a stroke about two years ago, and has been going through rehabilitation since then. A lot of you have been sending your best wishes to him, and Robin is so, so grateful for those! Today, after a long wait, we are finally delighted to tell you that Robin is back on the theHunter team. He is returning half-time initially and will slowly be working into full-time. He has already started working on a nice new feature and hopes that you will like it once it’s released. Once again, thank you to everyone who offered support and kind words.

That’s it from us for today, happy hunting!

Discussion