Status Update

Hello hunters,

Here is what we’ve been up to at theHunter HQ:

Valentine’s Day is looming

In tribute to Valentine’s Day, we’ll be kicking off a three-day-long event on Friday, with tricky challenges and sweet prizes. The details will be published in the blog on Friday morning.

Server migration news

The project of moving our server into a cloud environment is closing to its end. We’re working to make sure that the migration doesn’t cause any downtimes, but we can not rule out the possibility that there might be some, so we’ll make sure to let you know in advance when the Big Move is going to happen.

Ducks bug fixes

Tomorrow we’re releasing a game patch with a bunch of bug fixes, one of which a lot of you have complained about and which is known as ”ducks breaking and spooking bug”. We want to thank the community and especially Mickey415 for providing very thorough and valuable information when reporting the bug, it was of great help for Danny and Andrés!

On the topic of theHunter T-Shirt

Following all your great feedback we’ve received during the Spot a Dev event, we’ve decided to release our special T-Shirt in the store for a limited time only. The real T-Shirts we were wearing on the picture seemed to be even a bigger hit, so we’re looking into the possibility to open up a merchandise section to sell those.

Design competition deadline

Today at midnight CET is the deadline for the Design theHunter Outfit competition, so hurry up if you haven’t sent your contribution yet. We’ve received some very cool designs, can’t wait to get the voting going 😉

New Nosler missions

For those of you who are done with the Blaser missions and hungry for more, Daniel have baked a new bundle, this time featuring Nosler products.

Happy hunting!

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Spot a Dev – Winners

You’ve blown us away with the amount and quality of the pictures you’ve taken during the Spot on Dev event and choosing the winners was by far not easy. The team was unanimous in choosing the winner, but when it came to 2nd and 3d places, it was a head to head race.

Here are the pictures that were chosen the winners:

1st place: theHunter T-Shirt and 3000em$ goes to destuy for this amazing photo of StigOlow:

SpotOnDev_1st_place

2nd place: theHunter T-Shirt and 2000em$ goes to TPAKT0P for this gorgeous shot:

SpotOnDev_2nd_place

3d place was decided to divide between 3 hunters for these pictures:

Rigermas:

SpotOnDev_3d_place

DrRaton:

SpotOnDev_3d_1

& Mungo667:

SpotOnDev_3d_2

All three hunters will receive theHunter T-Shirts and 1000em$.

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who took part in the event, we had a blast, hope you too 😉

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Status Update

Hey you good hunters,

As promised, today we’re announcing a new event, namely…

Spot a Dev Competition

All members of our team will be roaming the Evergreen Hunting Reserves at different times Thursday through Friday and it’s your task to spot us. We’ll be wearing exclusive theHunter T-Shirts, so you can tell us apart from other players. The mission is simple – track down someone from our team, take a picture of them as a proof and post it in the competition thread. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into someone chatty (for example David ;)) and get a chance to have a good talk. The spotters who’ll manage to get best pictures will receive em$ and a cherry on top – that very exclusive theHunter T-Shirt. Make sure to read the complete competition rules in this forum thread.

To give you a hint who to look for, we took a team picture today (why, of course we’re wearing the same T-Shirts ;)). Here we are all, minus Pim, Danny, Andrés, Herman & Joachim all of whom are out of office today…

theHunter team

.. and plus David NAOutdoors checking in from across the globe:

David_NAOutdoors

So, keep your eyes peeled for the next two days and have fun dev-spotting!

Pim in the desert

Pim is now at a games conference in the USA, but he took some time to go shooting in the desert next to Vegas. Here he is, trying different weapons:

Pim_shooting_vegasPim shooting in Vegas       Pim shooting in Vegas

Cheating and fraud incidents uncovered

We have lately discovered a large amount of players who cheated by using game hacks. As you know, we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to cheaters, no matter members or guests, so all those players’ accounts were banned forever.

Another issue we’ve found out about is even more unpleasant. We discovered that someone was selling gift codes for theHunter em$ and memberships which were bought on our site with stolen credit card details. Since this is a crime, we’ll involve police into the investigation and, unfortunately, all players who’ve purchased such codes will lose their memberships, em$ and items bought using the codes. We’re asking you to always buy our memberships and em$ on our official site, to avoid losing money and becoming a fraud victim.

New Blaser missions

We’ve released 5 new missions featuring a Blaser shotgun, so make sure to lay your hands on those nifty weapons if you don’t have them yet.

Happy hunting and see you around!

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Status Update

Hi there and welcome to our weekly status update!

We’re starting with the sweetest piece of news…

Community competition – Design theHunter outfit

We’re inviting you to take part in co-creation of theHunter and we’ve chosen clothing as the area where we can allow some freedom, without running a risk of disturbing the game balance. So, today we are announcing a community competition to create a theHunter outfit. The winning design will get incorporated by the art team into a game outfit and afterwards released in the store. Please find the competition details here and let your creativity go wild.

Clothing competition

What’s up with Steam…

…some of you have wondered. We continue working on it, and our plan is to fix the server issues first, so the Steam launch won’t create unpleasant surprises for all of us. We’ll keep you updated how the work in this direction is going.

Translation help wanted

We are looking for volunteers to help us localize theHunter into all languages. To join the localization team, you need to be a native speaker of the language you apply to translate into and a hunter in real life. If you are interested to become a part of our localization team, send me a PM with your details and I’ll get back to you.

News from Andrés’s corner

As we announced yesterday, some bug fixes were released, alongside new player emotes.

And finally…

Next week we’re announcing a fun event, involving the whole dev team, so make sure to read our status update on Wednesday.

Good hunting all!

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Game update

Features
* Player Emotes. Learn more

Changes
* The 12GA single shot shotgun has a new fire sound
* The “pie menu” graphics have been updated. (Graphics shown when using a world item with the USE key, eg. dismantle a tent.)
* Some Mallard rares are less common
* Updated localization

Bug fixes
* Fix for random startup crash
* Fix for animal clues not being removed for host player when bagging an animal
* Fix for missing arrow impact sound when hitting animals
* Fix for missing score info in the spotting message for Mallards
* Fix for a rare bug causing mallards to spawn less often
* Fix for broken 8×57 Anschutz shoot animation when lying prone.

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Introducing theHunter emotes

Feel like giving someone thumbs up after a great hunt? We’ve got you covered! It’s today that we’re rolling out our new feature – emotes. Now your in-game character can make a whole bunch of gestures, such as wave, listen, ask someone to move or stop by using a hand, give thumbs up and down. In order to be able to make those gestures, you have to be a member.

To activate emotes, press the ‘T’ key and choose the gesture you want to make.

theHunter emotes

We hope that this feature will add a fun real-life touch to your hunting experience. Go crazy 😉

Share your thoughts and profile pictures featuring emotes in this thread.

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

Here comes the update with the bits and pieces of what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.

Russian avalanche

Last Thursday our registrations suddenly skyrocketed. The amount of new players went so high in such a short time, that our server couldn’t cope with the overload and we were forced to close down the registration for a couple of hours. Several ongoing games were also affected, our sincere apologies for that! We’ve detected the reason of the crash and made a fix, so it won’t happen again.

As we found out, this avalanche of new players mostly came from Russia and Russian speaking countries and was induced by the viral theHunter video made by two our players from Saint Petersburg.

No bad without good, we are happy to welcome all the new hunters – добро пожаловать!

Heads up from Herman

Speaking about server, we have started looking through the inventory code and some other parts of the in-game UI. Right now we are in the process of introducing big changes to the way we load the inventory, which will significantly cut load times. Hopefully, within a few weeks we’ll have a lightning fast inventory in place.

New shotgun and competitons

Today we stocked up the store with the brand new 12 GA Single Shot Shotgun, suitable for hunting all species, that are currently present in the game. You can buy it with gm$.

single shot shotgun

A new set of Mallard competitions got released on Monday. You can join via the Competitions page, if you haven’t done it yet.

Hit animal issue

Andrés has discovered another in-game issue that mostly affects players who hunt mallards.  A bit of technical background, to make it clear: Every animal in the game is assigned a ragdoll, which is a prerequisite for players to be able to hit an animal. Once you hit an animal, it reserves a ragdoll, which is freed when you confirm the killed animal with your huntermate or when you move farther than 220 meters away from the dead animal.

Right now there is a limit to the number of ragdolls of a type we can have active at the same time. Thus, if a player kills a lot of animals without confirming them, the game might run out of ragdolls, which basically means that the player will not be able to hit any more animals of that type again, until they confirm the animals that are dead.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

Hello Hunters,

This week’s status update comes a bit later, because we’ve been busy planning theHunter’s future for the next 6 months. Although we are not ready to reveal all the awesomeness yet, we can say that the roadmap looks pretty packed and colourful and future holds oodles of nifty things for all theHunter junkies out there, so stay tuned!

Following last week’s status update, new team members Adam, Jonathan and myself have received a great welcome from you, thanks a lot, we’re loving it! The three of us are settling in and warming up and it already feels like home here, with Hoggy and all.

Here are a couple of news and updates:

Rare ducks in town

New rare mallard variations have been released into Rougarou Bayo. The golden feathered beauty on the photo is one of them, but there are more, so keep your eyes peeled.

Rare mallard variation

3D outfit for all you swamp sneaksters

To get you covered while hunting in the swamps, we released a Sneaky 3D Swamp Camo Outfit, hope you’ll find some use for it. It’s already available in the Store.

Sneaky 3D Swamp Camo Outfit

Bug fixes

A number of bugs have been fixed in the new patch, including some mallards’ issues. Please find the whole list in this post.

Bouncing and disappearing ducks

Some of you have reported the problem with mallards falling onto the ground or water, followed by crazy bouncing around and sometimes disappearing.

Andres has done some investigation and, for what we know, one of the causes is running the game at too low FPS (frames per second), so the game physics doesn’t function properly. The physics calculations in theHunter work best at 30FPS minimum.

If you’re experiencing mallards’ bouncing and disappearing, please try to adjust your graphical settings, so you have at least 25 FPS, preferably 30 FPS.

Meanwhile, the team is trying to find a workaround for this problem and hopefully we’ll have a solution for you in the next patch.

Good hunting all!

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Game Update

Features
* Sneaky 3D Swamp Camo Outfit
* New mallard rare variations

Bug fixes
* Fix for high flying mallard sync between host and clients
* Fix for a random crash
* Fix for random crash at game startup
* Fix for animals not despawning when they should
* Fixed problems with web gui without internet and on load end
* Fix for random game disconnect when confirming animals
* Fixed avatar picture thumbnail
* Fix for decoy item gui message shown when client tried to place decoy
* Fix for mallards flying using swim animation
* Fix for web gui when having internet connection issues
* Small terrain fixes
* Added more logging and debugging to be able to catch more bugs

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