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Game Update

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Features
* Cottontail Rabbit
* .22 Air Rifle
* 3-9x32mm Air Rifle Scope

Changes
* All menus are now stored locally instead of being web browsers which should increase performance for some players

Bug fixes
* Updated pathfinding maps for hogs on Rougarou Bayou
* Camera “moves up” when reloading lever-action rifles while crouched
* Trophy Shot confirm options now say “Confirm Trophy Shot” instead of “Confirm Profile Shot”
* Fixed performance issue when shooting at pheasants at close distance with birdshot. (Too many decals were created)

Cottontail Rabbit Gameplay Notes

Cottontail rabbit

The cottontail rabbit does not make sounds loud enough to be detected as clues on the HunterMate, nor does it respond to any lures. This can make rabbit hunting quite frustrating if you do not know some very specific details about it’s behaviour.

Due to its small size and the high grass in areas where it is typically found it can be very difficult to detect and your first encounter is likely to be seeing it hopping away from you or finding a fleeing track.

In contrast to other species having a rabbit flush is not all bad. The cottontail will begin to search for a place to hide while running, usually thick vegetation such as bushes and shrubs. Once it has found a suitable hiding spot it will stay there and won’t come out for quite a while.

Multiple tactics can be used in this situation such as staking out the area where the rabbit is believed to be hiding and picking it off with a precision weapon such as a bow or air rifle once it comes out or to simply stomp around in the hiding area hoping to flush the wabbit like a Pheasant, taking it with a shotgun. There may be other tactics that we haven’t thought of but that will be for you guys to figure out.

Happy Rabbit-Hunting!

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Status Update

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Hello Hunters,

Today’s status update is longer than usual, but brimming with news, enjoy!

Trailer competition – Winners

All team members watched and evaluated the trailers submitted to the community competition and picked their favourites. The race for the first place was neck-to-neck, and the point difference was really tiny.  And the winners are:

1st place and 5000 em$ or a Pathfinder membership bundle go to Aruvyel for this luminous trailer:

2nd place and 3000 em$ or a Wayfarer membership bundle go to this epic creation by Nuubialainen:

3rd place and 1000 em$ go to ColoradoKid, he is also the winner in the nomination “The coolest ending”:

We want to thank everyone who had taken time to create their trailers but didn’t make it to the victory stand, you’ve done a very impressive job: Rantanrave, jummpy, shotty420, fape19888, Chanelyn, Faran, The-Lakota

Another community competition for the best trophy concept is still ongoing, it might be your chance to win bushels of fame and glory alongside some em$.

New member of the art team

This week we welcomed a new intern on board. His name is Marcus and he will be working with Peter, Tomas and Oskar on the graphical side of theHunter. Read his intro below and give him a nice welcome.

Markus Tuomi

Hi ,
My name is Marcus and I am the newest addition to the team. My role at Expansive Worlds will be creating various new 3D assets, and I will be working with my new teammates to keep the content flowing in the summer months!
Some general information about myself; since I was a little boy, I’ve always been a fan of wildlife and nature in general. And the desire to create new visual experiences has always driven me to try to push myself further. In my spare time I enjoy exploring new parts of the world, preferably visual experiences, and of course gaming! I also like spending time with friends and doing physical activities.

In 2011 I was accepted to a super fun gamedev school in Falun, Sweden, as a graphic artist. Two years later I moved to Stockholm to work for DICE as a 3D intern at Battlefield 4. Shooters have always been a big part of my gaming life and, since I am also fond of nature, I think I will enjoy my time here at Expansive Worlds, helping the team to develop already fantastic hunting experience!

Björn’s answers

Our game designer Björn has posted replies to the questions in his AMA, in which he revealed some hints about the future of theHunter, the most frustrating aspect of his work, which language the theHunter code is commented in, and lots of other curious things. If you want to get a better insight at the very bottom of the theHunter iceberg, give Björn’s post a read – it’s totally worth it.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits!”

… you’ll be able to say very soon. As most of you correctly deduced from our “sneak peek” picture in the last week’s status update, the18th and by far the cutest species in theHunter yet will be the rabbit, and namely the Cottontail Rabbit. Probably the biggest cottontail novelty is that it is going to be the second species you can hunt for free, alongside the Mule Deer. The release will be announced soon, until then here are some screenshots to bring you into the “wabbit” frame of mind:

2014_05_rabbit_1 2014_05_rabbit_2 2014_05_rabbit_3

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

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Hello hunters,

It’s time for a yet another status update, and here’s what’s been going on at EW:

Post-cloud-move turbulence

After we moved our game server to the cloud last week, as we’d anticipated, there has been a certain turmoil. In the week following the move we located and fixed more than 100 bugs, but there are still some serious residual bugs which we are aware of, both because of our own data and you reports in the forums (here, here and here). Here are the issues we are working on:

  • players not being able to confirm a kill
  • ”black screen” issue
  • security certificate issue in Firefox
  • connection problems when starting a new MP game
  • constant loading of a map, the landing page etc.
  • password recovery not working
  • misplaced equipment issue which happened yesterday and affected some players (their large equipment placed on the maps returned back to their inventories)

We sincerely apologize for all the troubles and issues that have been interrupting your games and causing you frustration! You can be sure that fixing them is our highest priority right now.

Community competition – Create the concept for a theHunter trophy

design_trophy_coin

Our last art competition Design theHunter outfit was a big success, and the winning design by Gostwind, incorporated into the real theHunter outfit by our art wizard Tomas, finally became available in the store. So, we thought we’d do it again.

Many of you have been expressing your disliking of the coin trophies which are currently being awarded for our standard competitions. In all honesty, we share your opinion on those and have been thinking to replace them with something more appealing for ages. Our art team have decided to give you, our community, a say and decide what trophies you want to have. Today we are announcing a new art competition to create the concept for a theHunter trophy to replace our old coins. The rules are going to be very similar to the outfit competition. Read them here and good luck!

Someone new is looming on the horizon…

It hasn’t been long since we released the Canada Goose, and today we’re thrilled to give you a sneak peek at the new, totally different species coming soon to EHR. We are not ready yet to reveal what it is or when it is going to be released, but here some hints for anyone curious: the new animal will live in Settler Creeks and Logger’s Point, will come with a couple of unique gameplay features and here is how it will look like against the horizon:

new animal

That is all from us for today.

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

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Changes
* We have added a limit to how fast you can take pictures with the digital camera

Bug fixes
* Game server communication improvements

 

 

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Game Update

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Features
* .30-30 Lever Action Rifle

Changes
* The Roosevelt elk now has a new Call animation.

Bug fixes
* Fix for crash at loading (as client) regarding waterfowls
* Fix for waterfowl decoys attracting wrong species
* Fix for trophy shot (it was possible to “throw” the animal up in the air and outside of the “invisible box”)
* Fixed bug – player wasn’t able to pose animals in water
* Fixed crossbow cocking bug
* Fixed tutorial bug where player couldn’t confirm animal after restart
* Fixed mute waterfowl ai groups bug in sp
* Fixed wrong stance shown in status bar when climbing towers or fast travelling
* Share on facebook checkbox only visible if connected to facebook (via theHunter.com)
* The huntermate map can now show more than five icons of the same type
* You can no longer be knocked down by an animal if you are in a tree stand
* Game server communication improvements
* Fix for texture bug with all scopes
* Fix for help messages in Trophy Shot not disappearing when exiting Trophy Shot
* Small terrain fixes

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Status Update

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Hello Hunters,

Here are a couple of news for you from the drizzly Stockholm:

It’s cloud o’clock

… at last. During our maintenance yesterday, as the final step of implementing a new server solution for theHunter, we moved our game server to the cloud. It’s been a long and rather complicated process and it’s not completely finalized yet, as we’re continuing putting out fires, smashing bugs and indulge ourselves in other exciting activities to ensure the game runs without a hitch. It will take a while once the new environment works as smoothly as intended; we’ll keep monitoring the server performance and resolve issues on the fly. As always, your help in reporting bugs is appreciated, you can do it in this thread, detailed descriptions are mostly welcomed.

We want to thank you for all your patience and support during this process of server move. To make it up to you for a downtime yesterday and game disrupting issues, we’ll be adding an extra day to all active memberships.

AMA with Björn

björn öjlertIt’s time for a new ‘Ask Me Anything’ session and now it’s our game designer Björn who will be answering your questions. You can think of Björn as the director of theHunter who oversees the overall picture and knows game’s every nook and cranny. He is the guy to ask ”big” questions, like gameplay, environment, balance, story etc., but he is also able to give thorough replies to more specific inquiries.

Björn’s AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CEST on May 9th. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by the moderation team, the standard AMA rules apply.

 

Trailer competition reminder

In case you missed it last week, we have a trailer competition running, and it’s a bit less than one week left to submit your video. You can read the rules and enter the competition here.

That’s it for now, happy hunting!

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Scheduled Server Maintenance

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On Wednesday, 7th May 2014 at 06:00 CEST, we will take down the servers for scheduled maintenance work. The estimated downtime is about 3 hours. During this period you will not be able to login to your game accounts nor start any game sessions. All sessions active at this time will be terminated, so please make sure to finish your hunts before 6:00 CEST to avoid losing your stats.

After the maintenance is complete we will continuously monitor the servers and take an immediate action if any irregular behaviors are identified. We will do our best to make sure that the downtime is as short as possible but, as with all server work, there might be uncertainties and setbacks.

You can stay updated during the downtime by monitoring our Facebook page and Twitter handle, as well as our temporary landing page on www.thehunter.com.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

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Status Update

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Hello hunters,

There was no status update last week, since we were busy with the beta test, so we’ve packed the news from the last two weeks together. And here you go:

Stress test on beta: Heads up and thanks

Last week we ran a stress test of our new server environment on Google App Engine, which many of you joined. Huge thanks to everyone who found time to participate, we really appreciate your help! In general, the test went well, the server managed to cope with the load. We’ve found some bugs and issues, which are being worked on right now. To release fixes for those, we’ll be doing server maintenance in the next couple of weeks, the exact date and time will be communicated well in advance.

New video competition: theHunter video trailer

It’s has been a while since our last video competition, so let’s do it again. This time we’d like you to create a short video trailer of the game. The trailer has to highlight the hallmarks of theHunter: stunning scenery, the tension of shooting an animal, action-packed gameplay. The winner will receive 5000 em$ or a ‘Pathfinder’ membership bundle, not to mention all the fame and glory. You can read the competition rules here.

2014_05_movie_challenge

Introducing changes in the bug handling process

Lately there has been growing frustration within the community regarding the way in which bugs and bug reports are handled. We appreciate your willingness to help us find and resolve bugs and we do acknowledge that there were some annoying issues that fell between the cracks in the past, so we’ve evaluated and revamped our process for collecting and documenting information about bugs.

There is a lot of internal work going on, but for you the most significant change is the new rules that apply to reporting bugs in the forum. From now on all submitted posts will undergo thorough pre-moderation, to ensure that only real issues with sufficient and relevant information find their way onto the development agenda, allowing the team to address bugs in a more efficient manner, without having to trawl through loads of often unrelated discussions. You can learn more about the changes in this announcement. We’ll also try to provide timely feedback in bug forum threads on the status of the issue, so the whole bug fixing process will hopefully become more open and transparent.

Like with any new process, there might be some bumps in the beginning, so we’re asking for your patience.

German forum volunteers wanted

As the highly valued admins of our German community forum MonacoSteve and Welsch are leaving their posts in favour of other duties, we are looking for volunteers who would be willing to step in and help us manage huntertalk.de. We are looking for Admins / Mods who speak fluent German and good English, are keen theHunter players and preferably have some experience with phpBB forum platforms.

If you’re interested or have any questions please send me a PM on the English or German forum.

That’s it for now, good hunting all!

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Game Update

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Changes
* You can now shoot closer to another player. (It makes it easier to shoot at waterfowl when several players are close to each other)
* Updated localization

Bug fixes
* Fix for bug spooking animals far away
* Fix for .30-06 Lever Action Rifle iron sight (it was backwards)
* Fix for crash when client shoots a 3D animal target at Red Feather Falls
* Fix for crash when host plays in Russian and a non Russian player joins
* Fix for gender not showing if clicking a trotting clue before any other clue
* Fix for being able to move the camera in the background while viewing a Profile Photo
* Fix for sometimes seeing a “white” reticle when lowering a weapon

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