Moving to the cloud

As you know from our earlier status updates, we have been working on implementing a new server solution for theHunter.com. Moving the code base to the cloud has been a major task for us, but a necessary one to keep up with the demands of new players coming in and make sure that the service is stable and minimize downtime.

This project is now coming to a close, and we will make the switch to the cloud during next week. Moving to the cloud will be a two step process, beginning at around 7 AM on the morning of Monday, March 17th. We will start by deploying the new, cloud prepared code to our current live server. This will cause some downtime, and any running games will be closed. Once we re-open the site, you should be able to play as you normally do.

When the code is up and running, we will monitor traffic for a while to make sure that everything is stable. Once we feel certain that everything is working as intended, we will once again close the site while we make the actual move to the cloud. This will happen within a few days from the first release, and will be announced in advance. This will again cause some downtime while we point our DNS servers towards the version of theHunter running in the cloud. Once the DNS change falls through, you will be able to access theHunter.com in the new server environment.

The move to the cloud means that we have been making a lot of code changes behind the scenes. Some features have seen minor noticeable upgrades or tweaks, but the site should look and feel pretty much the same as before. As always, theHunter.com is evolving and we will continue to monitor traffic and performance after we make the switch to get the site running as fast and bug-free as possible.

This update will also include the new inventory that we have previously mentioned. The new inventory works the same way as the old one, but major changes have been made to the way it handles your inventory data, and as a result many players will experience significantly shorter load times.

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

This week’s status update is shorter than usual, since it’s rather quiet in the office, with all the attention concentrated on Herman, Emil and Adam’s corner and the upcoming server move. Speaking of which,

Server update

We had to shift the server move to early next week, to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. Later this week we’ll publish more detailed information about the work we are doing as well as the dates and scheduled downtimes.

User survey

We want to get to know you, our community, better and hear what you have to say. So, today we’re launching a user survey and inviting you to complete it, to help us improve theHunter. The results of the survey will guide us in our future work on developing the game, however, we are asking you not to make assumptions that certain features will be introduced, based solely on the fact that they were mentioned in the survey.

The survey is already live and will be open until March 23rd midnight CET, so you will have 10 days to complete it. It shouldn’t take you longer than 15 minutes to answer all the questions, and you can only participate once. We will appreciate your honest and detailed answers. You can choose to remain anonymous or fill in your theHunter name, in the latter case you will automatically take part in our em$ draw, during which we will randomly choose three players who have completed the survey and will add 1000 em$ to their accounts. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.

Complete the survey

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

It’s Wednesday and it’s time for that weekly dose of tidbits from the EW headquarters.

Server move next week: Planned downtime

Our backend wizards are approaching the finishing line of their more than month long work; that means that next week we’ll be finally moving our server to the Google App Engine, which will hopefully significantly improve players’ experience. Inevitably, there will be a couple of hours downtime related to the move, and we will make sure to announce the exact date and time well in advance, for you to be able to plan accordingly. Our apologies for any inconveniences!

Design theHunter Outfit Competition: Results

The voting is finished and the winners are chosen by you. The community was unambiguous about the winning design – 50% of all votes went to the ”3D Leaf Camo” Ghillie Suit by GostWind. Our art team will pick it up and evaluate how we can incorporate the idea in the game. We can not tell the exact date when it’ll be released in the store, but you probably can expect it within next couple of months.

According to the voting results, the second place and 2000 em$ went to Gooseman81 for his Outdoors Man set (53 votes), and the third one to Ruuster12 for his variant of the ghillie suit (50 votes). However and sadly, we had to disqualify Ruuster12’s design, since we received confirmed reports that the creator attempted to solicit votes by sending private messages to other players. Our goal is a fair and square competition, that’s why we’ve decided to give the third place and 1000 em$ to Hiijinx for his Gamekeeper Attire design, which finished 4th with 37 votes.

Here are the winning designs:

1st place: GostWind

Gostwind

2nd place: Gooseman81

Gooseman81

3d place: Hiijinx

Hiijinx

We also liked some ideas from other designs, especially the second and third places, so we do not exclude the possibility that they will also get incorporated in theHunter in the future. We’ll keep you posted!

Thank you everyone who’ve participated in this competition, either by creating a design or by voting and commenting!

International Women’s Day in theHunter

After our Manly Man competition dedicated to Men’s Day, we’ve been receiving a lot of feedback asking whether there’d be a female day equivalent. And yes, we’ve prepared a special event to celebrate the International Women’s Day on March 8th. The details will be announced on Saturday.

On the matter of bugs

Following the release of the Army Cap with a Brazilian flag last week, there was a heated forum discussion which, as it sometimes happens in our community, resulted into the “new items vs. old bugs” flame war. I thought it might help if we give an official response on the matter. For starters, I’d like to clarify that creating new items has nothing to do with fixing bugs, we have two different teams dedicated to those tasks and those are two parallel and independent processes. That’s why arguments like: ”Instead of making new clothes you’d better fix one-year-old bugs,” don’t hold water and do nothing but bring frustration to the community and the dev team, because we, like everyone, also need appreciation for the work we do.

Another thing I’d like to bring up with you is that it is our goal and ambition to fix all the bugs. If we receive a detailed report and can reproduce the bug (like it was with the recent Mallard issues), we usually release the fix for it in the next game patch. If the information in the bug report is not sufficient enough, or we are not able to reproduce the issue ourselves, it would take a developer a long time to find and fix the problem, which would of course disrupt the development process and cause delays in releasing new features. If a bug has been reported and is not fixed yet, most likely it’s because we were not able to reproduce it on our side. That’s why we always ask you, when reporting bugs, to post detailed step-by-step descriptions in the bug section of the forum.

Speaking of which, as you might have seen, our awesome moderators have started to bring some order into that section by creating user-friendly indices (Animals and Miscellaneous are already done), with reference numbers to our official bug tracking system, where applicable. Please refer to those before posting a new bug report.

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

This week our status update comes a bit later, and here’s why:

EW Go-karting race

Yesterday we went to blow off some steam and did go-kart racing. Despite a couple of nasty scuffles, we are happy to let you know that all the devs are still safe and sound enough to continue working on bugs fixes and new features. Although Pim was rather unequivocal about his winner’s preferences, it was Herman, Emil and Robin who made it to the victory stand. The fact that the two of the team’s fastest and most technical racers are the ones working on our server migration, is quite comforting, right? 😉

Go Kart Race - winners

Gift codes scam continues

Sadly, we still have problems with people selling our gift codes bought with stolen credit card details. We want to alert everyone that if you’ve purchased such a code on a third-party site, per Skype, or anywhere else but our official homepage, we will remove all em$, items and memberships acquired with this code, and it’s only the scammer you paid your money to will benefit from it. If you find out that someone is selling theHunter gift codes cheaper than our official price, it is a sure sign there’s something fishy and we’d really appreciate if you let us know about such incidents.

Ask Me Anything

Today we’re introducing a new community feature – Ask Me Anything. For starters, it will be me who you will be able to put your questions to, and if it is a success, we’ll be hosting AMA sessions with other team members as well.

Here is your unique chance to ask something you’ve always wondered, but please respect the rules:

• Our Code of Conduct applies

• No tech support and bugs related questions, as these usually require a thorough personal investigation and we have specific channels for those type of queries (customer support and Bug Reports forum)

• Try to avoid opinionated questions, eg. ”Why does the new gun suck?”

• Do not repost your question multiple times

• All questions may be asked, but not all questions may be answered, although I’ll do my best to reply to everything I can. If I the answer is unknown or can’t be revealed, I’ll let you know. Questions will be answered not necessarily in the order in which they’re posted.

The AMA thread will be unlocked for 48 hours, starting at 12 p.m. CET on February 28. All the questions will be moderated and supervised by me and the moderation team. I’ll do my best to reply to all the questions within a week after the AMA session is over.

UPDATE: The AMA Thread is now unlocked for questions.

Design competition – vote now

The poll for the community design competition closes in 3 days, please make sure to vote for the design you want to be implemented in theHunter.

Aimpoint sights

Yesterday we released two Aimpoint sights that seemed to become quite a hit, sweet! Some of you have pointed out that the original definition ”scopes” was not quite accurate, since they are in fact sights. The point taken and the descriptions are updated accordingly, we are happy to admit our mistakes.

Happy hunting!

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Game Update

Features
* Updated localization

Changes
* Arrow impact sound distance increased to 20-30m

Bug fixes
* Fix for the scopes attached a bit above the weapon
* Fix for rare crash when hitting animals

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Design theHunter Outfit – Honourable mentions

From the thirty designs submitted to the competition only seven were chosen for the final voting round. However, some of the designs that for one or another reason didn’t make it are very good and deserve to be seen by the community. That’s why we’ve decided to put them together as Honourable mentions.

By Pastuh:

pastuh

By TundraPuppy:

tundrapuppy

By MonacoSteve:

MonacoSteve

By Sayanel:

sayanel1

By CaptainMunch:

Bearrie Suit female   Bearrie Suit male

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

This status update is quite packed with goodies, so grab your coffee, sit back and enjoy 😉

New semi-automatic shotgun and a new challenge

Tomorrow we’re releasing a weapon, which a lot of you have been eagerly waiting for – 20 GA semi-automatic shotgun. Since it has been a hot community topic literally for years, we’ve decided to do something special this time to celebrate the launch, so today we’re running a unique challenge, 5 lucky winners of which will get the new shotgun for free! Read the details and join here.

Please note that, for now, the new shotgun will be released with birdshot ammo only.

Semi-automatic shotgun challenge

An eventful rest of the week

To pay tribute to the Olympic Games in Sochi, we’ve created our own version of the Olympics – theHunter Quadrennial Bird Games 2014, during which you’ll be able to put a new “semi-awesomatic” shotgun to test. The challenge will launch tomorrow, so keep an eye on our updates.

Another event we’ll be celebrating this week is February 23, which is the Men’s Day in Russia and other Russian speaking countries. We’ll be throwing a proper hunting party on that day, make sure to check the forums on Sunday for details.

Design theHunter Outfit – the voting starts today

We’ve received 30 submissions for the Design theHunter Outfit competition, and we were pleasantly surprised by the overall quality level, thanks to everyone who took their time to participate! The team put their heads together and picked 7 to go through to the final voting round. When choosing designs for voting we were taking into consideration a number of criteria: how well a specific outfit would fit into the theHunter world and gameplay, how much resources its incorporation would require, as well as the general idea and implementation.

Cast your vote here

A piece on theHunter

Pim has recently been interviewed by the video gaming website Polygon, alongside the CEO of Avalanche Studios. It has been talked about the future of Avalanche in general and theHunter in particular. You can read the whole article here.

Happy hunting everyone!

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Game Update

Features
* Mallard hunting tutorial

Changes
* New reload animations for pump shotgun
* New reload animations for lever action
* Small performance improvements when aiming at animals
* Improved animal hit detection
* Animal feeder pie menu options back to original layout

Bug fixes
* Mallard ducks spook bug when client player whistles fixed
* Mallard ducks spook bug when re-entering player “spawn” radius fixed
* Pie menu after being hurt fixed
* Fixed minor things with pie menu
* Mallard ducks multiplayer sync bugs fixes
* Camera overlay fix
* Fix for crash when client tries to use a world item when the host already removed it
* Gui properly restores after changing between windowed and fullscreen mode

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Announcing Valentine’s Hunting Spree

theHUnter Valentine's hunting spree

It’s that day again, whether you love it or hate it. We’re celebrating it theHunter style, by taking a plunge into a three-day-long hunting spree where intricacy meets elegance.

Heart is the name of the game today, so the main challenge is to hit an animal in the heart. Each day there will be a different animal and a different weapon, with the difficulty level increasing from Friday to Sunday. We’ll be running sales on the items and licenses needed in the competitions and, as a special bonus, the Cupid arrows will be available in the store throughout the whole event at a very sweet price (it’s Valentine’s day after all).

The top 10 hunters of each day will be awarded with em$ and gorgeous trophies created by Oskar. Each trophy is unique, so you’ll have three chances to win a truly exclusive award. Yes, the competition will be fierce but so is love, isn’t it? 😉

Happy heart-hunting!

 

Valentine’s Hunting Spree

 

February 14th – Romantic Elk competition

Details: Roosevelt Elk vs. .30-06 Lever Action Rifle

Sales: .30-06 Lever Action Rifle, .30-06 Nosler Partition, 4-8x32mm Rifle Scope – up to 30% off. Roosevelt Elk license – 25% off. Bonus: Cupid arrows at 20% off

Trophies for the first 3 places:

valentine_2014_trophy_elk_01  valentine_2014_trophy_elk_02  valentine_2014_trophy_elk_03

Join now!

 

February 15th – Rosy Roe Deer competition

Details: Roe Deer vs. .270 Bolt Action Rifle

Sales: .270 Bolt Action Rifle, 3-9x40mm Rifle Scope, .270 Nosler Ballistic Tip – up to 25% off. Roe Deer license – 25% off. Bonus: Cupid arrows at 20% off

Trophies for the first 3 places:

Valentine's hunting spree - 1st place  valentine_2014_trophy_deer_02  valentine_2014_trophy_deer_03

Join now!

 

February 16th – Ravishing Red Fox competition

Details: Red Fox vs. Compound Bow “Snakebite”

Sales: Compound Bow “Snakebite”, Compound Arrows, Cupid Arrowsup to 40% off. Red Fox license – 25% off.

Trophies for the first 3 places:

valentine_2014_trophy_fox_01  valentine_2014_trophy_fox_02  valentine_2014_trophy_fox_03

Join now!

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