Author Archives: Philipp Strecker

Status Update

Posted on by

Status Update – November 03

Howdy hunters,

this week’s status update is again brought to you by Phil who – this time – will actually go on a short vacation trip over the weekend, hopefully also slurping drinks in the sun as our beloved Alena still does.

Enough chit chat though, let’s get to the far more interesting updates.

Movember

As mentioned on the forums, this year there will not be any fresh beards or facial hairstyles.
We decided to spend more time polishing the work on Timbergold Trails and to invest our efforts into core content, such as the upcoming Gray Wolf.

Of course, we will still participate in creating awareness about cancer and hopefully improve regular and early check-ups. Check out some of the team members trying their best at growing a mustache on Instagram.
And of course all existing beard styles are available in the in-game shop where we will give $2 per sold mustache to charity.

We want to thank everyone who supports this movement and of course encourage everyone to take this seriously. Don’t play it down – early and regular check ups play a vital role and it is up to everyone of us to make an effort.

Movember 2016

Gray Wolf

Last week, we officially announced the Gray Wolf and we are humbled by your feedback so far. It feels like we made the right decision to go for this amazing animal and we are closely observing any feedback. So don’t hold back and let us know what you think, hope for and more!

Last time we shared work-in-progress screenshots and this week it is time for some moving images! Still taken from early development, we were able to steal a short video from Morris and Moe showcasing animations. Let us know what you think!

Updates

As we move on with increasing momentum on the Wolf, it might get a bit quieter in the next weeks when it comes to updates. Of course we are still monitoring data, your feedback and more and will jump on issues as we identify them.
Here is a reiteration of yesterday’s game update with a sneaky addition (we are working on increasing the amount of possible clues on Timbergold Trails) and of course we are looking into a solution for equipment that was placed beyond the recently updated borders on Timbergold Trails.

Bug fixes

* Fix for pink texture error and crash near the reserve borders on Timbergold Trails
* Fix for Bighorn sheep odd animations on very steep mountains
* Fix for rare crash that can happen on client connection on certain reserves
* Issues with patching system that caused infinite download loop
* Crashes while patching to a newer launcher version
* Disabled the Halloween version of the Elk
* Disabled spook an animal contextual help

In progress:

* Shooting Ranges preparing to open
* Increased amount of possible clues on Timbergold Trails

There are more (way more) things in progress but here we only state what is close to completion within the next week(s)

Misc.

* Localization update

That’s it!

All the best from theHunter team and a snowy Stockholm!

Discussion

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Game Update

Posted on by

Live Patch 2016110101

Bug fixes

* Fix for pink texture error and crash near the reserve borders on Timbergold Trails
* Fix for Bighorn sheep odd animations on very steep mountains
* Fix for rare crash that can happen on client connection on certain reserves
* Issues with patching system that caused infinite download loop
* Crashes while patching to a newer launcher version
* Disabled the Halloween version of the Elk
* Disabled spook an animal contextual help

In progress:

* Shooting Ranges preparing to open
There are more (way more) things in progress but here we only state what is close to completion within the next week(s)

Misc.

* Localization update

Discussion

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Status Update

Posted on by

Status Update – October 28

Howdy hunters,

this week’s status update is brought to you by Phil – who is not on vacation in Thailand, slurping drinks in the sun – but all the happier to write these words.

Let’s get right to it.

Timbergold Trails

It has been one week since the release of Timbergold Trails and we are thrilled about all the feedback that you left us. It makes us very happy that you enjoy the new reserve, animals and shared your feedback about the positive and of course the negative stuff as well.

We continue our work on fixing the initial problems of the patching system, border crashes and more and improved on the failed patch this Wednesday.

It will undergo more testing and will hopefully be ready for next week.

Timbergreywolf

Slightly tricky but all the more enjoyable from our end was the announcement of the next species in the EHR and it is finally happening. After seven years, theHunter will bring Grey Wolves into the game.

We will gradually share more news about this milestone in the upcoming weeks and like you to meet first screenshots, which is taken from early development.

Work in Progress Grey Wolf

Work in Progress Grey Wolf

Early Development

Early Development

Timberhalloween

It seems that the last patch brought even more uninvited guests than anticipated!
Honoring the yearly tradition, you can find a new beast variant of an animal in the game – at your own risk – next to spooky sales in the store and a mission to win a unique trophy!

Happy Halloween!

Timbercontextual Help

With Wednesday’s patch, we also introduced a new feature called Contextual Help.

Our aim is to help the newest of players to learn the ropes of theHunter.
As many of you know, it takes quite some time to understand and get good at this game. While we have an excellent, community-driven wiki, many video and text tutorials and divine support from all the experienced hunters on the forum, it can still be difficult to grasp what to do during your first hunts.
Enter the contextual help system which will give you hints based on what you do.
We have added the first hint, which tells player that running will spook animals.

More hints will follow in the future and as always, we would love to hear what you think about this.

Hint: You can turn off the feature in the launcher game settings and we will add a function to en / disable it from within the in-game settings as well.

(Thanks to killertut for reminding us about this 🙂 )

Timberupdates

And finally, to keep you in the loop, here is a selection of what is currently in progress on our end.

This list does not include everything as we don’t want to promise things that we can’t deliver (and this still counts for this list as well) but we want to reassure that we are continuing to work on your feedback.

Fixed:

  • Increased the chance of bighorn sheeps to start fighting which will increase the amount of clues on your HunterMate.

In Progress:

  • Infinite patching loop in launcher
  • Crash when updating from older versions of the launcher to current one
  • Pink textures and crash close to borders
  • Animals crossing the borders out of the reserve
  • Tweaking populations for how many animals you will encounter in the Timbergold Trails

That’s it!

All the best from a sickness struck theHunter team and have a great hunt out there!

Discussion

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Game Update

Posted on by

Live Patch 2016102601

Features

* New contextual help system (more on that in tomorrow’s status update – but do check your launcher game settings for a checkbox on “Contextual Help”)

Bug fixes

* Fix for pink texture error and crash near the reserve borders
* Improved pathfinding
* Fix to missing collision on some lodge’s tables
* Fix that some trees had too big collision
* Fix collision on some small tree that prevent player to walk through them

In progress:

* Bighorn sheep can have odd animations on very steep mountains
* Shooting Ranges preparing to open
* Bighorn sheep call is not triggered frequently enough
* Rare crash can happen on client connection in certain reserve
* Issues with patching system that caused infinite download (tried to patch this today but without success – we will try again soon this time with success!)
* Crashes while patching to a newer launcher version (tried to patch this today but without success – we will try again soon this time with success!)

Misc.

* Localization update

Discussion here

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Game Update

Posted on by

Hello Hunters,

we hope you are all doing well and enjoy the hunt! We just uploaded a new live patch and here is what it contains :

Features

  • Updated Ptarmigan behaviour for fleeing and migrating

SplashScreen_weapon_heavyrecurvebow_InstinctiveArcher

Bug fixes

  • Fixed missing experience points from tracking animal clues
  • Fixed bug in the Sitka mission “The Smell of Fear”

Misc.

  • Localization update

Let us know what you think in the Discussion.

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Open Beta February 18th

Posted on by

 

The Open Beta has started. Click here for a How To Guide on the Forum.


Open BetaAs we promised in our last status update, we are inviting everyone to try out the Polar Bear in our open beta. Come help us test the new ruler of the Whiterime Ridge!

Call to open beta testing – Start February 18th 2016

  • The testing will take place on our beta server and will run for about a week (subject to change), starting from February 18th, around 16:00 CET. Please note that you won’t be able to create an account before that. If you already have an account from our previous open beta sessions, you will be able to log in starting from 16:00 CET (subject to change).
  • From Wednesday until Friday we’ll be testing the “vulnerable” mode of the Polar Bear, after that – the special event mode.
  • Players will be able to hunt all animals, regardless of whether they are members or not, and will receive 10 000 em$ for testing purposes.
  • Please note that items you buy on our beta server with the aforementioned em$ won’t be transferred to your actual game account.
  • After the end of the open beta your access to the server will be revoked.
  • Testing on beta won’t have any impact on your actual game stats, hunter score, leaderboard positions etc.
  • Because it’s a stress test, server hiccups are likely to happen, so your game could crash or get disconnected, response times might be longer etc.

How to participate in the testing:

  1. Starting from tomorrow, February 18th, around 16:00 CET, go to https://www.thehunterbeta.com/ and create a new account/login to your existing one
  2. If you are new to open beta – Download and install the beta game client from Downloads.
  3. Hunt, hunt, hunt!

What we’d like you to pay special attention to while testing:

We will add the specific information before the open beta starts.

When testing on beta you are likely to see some historical testing data (competitions, leaderboards, players’ names and such). Please disregard that as this is dummy data randomly generated from our live server for testing purposes. There is also a chance that some icons and images are missing from the Beta servers so there is no need to report this.

Please report all your feedback in this thread.

Thanks a lot for supporting the game! 🙂

 

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Status Update

Posted on by

Hey hunters,

Welcome to our weekly status update.

We start by looking back to the latest highlight, Whiterime Ridge.
The addition of the latest hunting reserve has been a success and well received by players, especially those who were waiting to hunt Bison and the like in cold and solitary lands.
In numbers, there have been more than 175.000 hunts in Whiterime Ridge since its release.
This translates to over 200.000 harvested Bison, 89.000 Sitka Deer, 37.000 Snowshoe Hare and 19.000 Arctic Fox.
That is some pretty good hunting, keep it up!

Although the new reserve has been loved and well received since its release, the game has been plagued with subsequent issues, leaving some of you unable to play theHunter at all.
This is unacceptable and it’s all hands on deck to fix bugs/issues. Some are more complicated than others so bear with us as we sort it out. Full steam ahead.

Our producer Hannes wants to address this situation as well:

“Everybody who is affected by these issues will be compensated. Before we can roll out the compensations, we have to fix the issues, get the final picture of the severity as well as the details of the ones affected. We are on it.”

Today we have released a second patch with fixes and added tools to collect data on complex issues.

Completed fixes:

  • The Sitka deer now calls audible and correctly
  • Ground haze effect disabled while looking in binoculars and weapon scopes to improve performance
  • Issues related to bait *see below
  • Leaderboards no longer disappear randomly, clicking scores and player names to get to the correct pages
  • Fixed player cold faint sync between clients when ragdoll
  • Lightning issues: lowered specular intensity on models and terrain

In progress:

  • Improve patch download speed
  • Multiplayer connectivity issues
  • Major server stability improvements
  • Added additional logging information to pinpoint complex issues with game server communication

Bear barrels and hog feeders:

The issue causing bear barrels and hog feeders to show an incorrect number in the launcher and in the web has finally been fixed. There was no bait lost as a result of this bug, however, it had a negative impact on gameplay for many bear and pig hunters, so here is the compensation we are offering. Everyone who will visit www.thehunter.com and log in to the game starting from this Friday, October 23th until November 5th, will receive 1000 units of bear bait and 1000 units of hog bait for free.

New object: The Happy Camper Heated Tent

For the ones who want to stick to their beloved outfit in the cold of Whiterime Ridge and sometimes take it too far (or the ones who go for a too refreshing swim), there is something new:

The Happy Camper Heated Tent!

Heated Tent

It will allow you to fast travel to tents after succumbing to hypothermia while providing a fresh look as well. Just be sure to do some push ups before carrying it around for long distances.
You can find it discounted in the store from today.

Finally, we are thankful and really appreciate the communication with you, theHunter community. You remind us what is important, by praising as well as criticizing alike.

All the best,

your theHunter team

 

Discussion

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Game Update

Posted on by

Fellow Hunters,

as our beloved Alena is still on vacation, we present you another slightly larger game update instead of the regular status update.

So, what’s new?

Spooking - Will not work on dead mallards.

Spooking – Will not work on dead mallards.

Dog Spooking 
The dog systems have been polished and your furry friend will now correctly spook other animals. No more immersion breaking  super stealth dogs.
This also brings much more attention to your dog’s skills.

Our Game Designer Daniel wrote a little note on the reasoning:

“As many of you have noticed the animals in theHunter do not really care that there is a whole bunch of Labrador Retrievers running around the Evergreen Hunting Reserve. The dogs can bark, just sit in plain sight of a deer or rush around among a flock of geese on a field and it would not upset any of the animals. This was, as many of you understand, not our intention. Several of the skills the dog have are based on that the dog should spook animals but these skills are rendered pointless for the moment. Until now. We have fixed the bug so that the barking can spook animals. The issue that the dog won’t spook animals that see it has also been addressed. Luckily the more you level up your dog, the more stealthy it will get.

Things that governs a dog’s visibility are:

  • If it is “crouching” (Governed by the “Follow Stance” skill)
  • If it is sitting (Governed by the “Loyalty” skill)
  • If it is laying down (Governed by the “Loyalty” skill)
  • If it is less eager to bark (Governed by the “Focus” skill)
  • If it is in a Blind (Governed by the “Loyalty” skill)

So now leveling up your dog is more than just making sure your dog follows the fetch command as often as possible. Now leveling up is what will make the difference between a rowdy mutt and a loyal working dog.”

Let us know what you think!

Dog Vest
The first dog vest is out!
You can now hunt in blazing partner looks!

Sound Fixes
We have fixed a couple of things regarding the latest sound issues and looking forward to your feedback.

Store Updates

  • New Dog Vest added (+ Bundle)
  • New Bandanas added

And now to the part you all know and are waiting for, the summary of changes and fixes:

Features

  • Dog vest added

Bug fixes

  • Possible fix for sound bug (siren)
  • Dog bark not spooking animals bug fix
  • Fix for bug when picking up world items and inventory “thought” it was full (although there was enough place)

Changes

  • Animals are able to see dogs, and spook
  • Rabbits dying trying to enter burrow will die above ground instead of inside burrow
  • Dog gets “teleported” when climbing walls on Val-des-Bois
  • Updated localization

Let us know what you think in the Discussion

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail

Game Update

Posted on by

Hello Hunters,

this patch brings fancy changes so we decided to make the game update a little fancier as well (mostly we just want to fool around with Alena’s established systems while she is on vacation).

So, what’s new?

Fetching Rabbits

 

Fetching rabbits is here!
By popular demand your furry friend is now able to retrieve rabbits as well!
Enjoy the hunt and let us know your stories!

Store Updates

  • Own Limit removed
    As announced last week, we now have removed the Own Limitation on (almost) all items. Now you can get all the bundles you want, just be sure to check our refund policy.
  • Sales Category added
    You can find a new category at the top of the store called “Sales”. Here you can find all the items that are currently on discount at a glance.
    Beware: The layout might be as crazy as the discounts!
  • Bundles as Default navigation
    When you enter the store you will now come to the Bundles Page by default.
  • New Collars and Clothing
    Check the store for the new Sneaky 3D Summer Field Camouflage as well as new Dog Collars!

And now to the part you all know and are waiting for, the summary of changes and fixes:

Features

  • Dog fetching both european rabbits and cottontail rabbits

Bug fixes

  • 180 degree sound bug fix

Changes

  • Updated localization

Let us know what you think in the Discussion (a small competition is waiting there as well)

Share this
Facebooktwitterredditmail