Howdy hunters!

Thank you for all your comments! I did not expect so many of them –- over 500 across all our social channels.

One important thing I forgot to mention in the original announcement is that I won’t be answering questions about bugs or game suggestions in this Q&A. I really love hearing your ideas and will definitely include many of them into the game’s roadmap, but to keep things focused, we’re leaving those discussions out today. However, we’re aware of most issues and have added them to our bug base with the intention of fixing them as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!

Let’s start!

Q: How did you come to become a producer of theHunter Classic?
A: Though I have nearly 15 years of management experience in IT, I’ve never been involved in the Games Industry before. Last summer Anton Iljin (CEO of Ringtail Studios) asked me if I was up to a new challenge in the role of Producer for theHunter Classic –- a game which I had never heard of before. As I love challenges, I accepted it. I was very naive and had a lot to learn in the beginning! But now I am very happy this happened to me.

Q: Will there be a new map coming soon?
A: While we continue investigating our options, we have no current plans for a new reserve. We are devoting our time to providing players with regular content updates and bug fixes. That doesn’t mean a new reserve will never be added to the EHR in the future, though!

Q: Can you add [insert animal here] to theHunter Classic?
A: We’re always listening to your ideas to try and determine what is most wanted in each category (animals, weapons, features, etc.). However, please understand that a brand new animal is something that requires time to be created (research, 3D model, textures, animations, sounds, AI, etc.), and the rate at which we can add them to the game is limited.

Q: What are your nearest plans?
A: We have a long roadmap of new features, animals, events, and content to come. Stay tuned!

Q: Are Expansive Worlds still involved in the development of the game?
A: Yes. Expansive Worlds sees this as a collaboration and is actively working with and supporting Ringtail Studios, to ensure we are delivering what players are looking for. The whole production (game design, development, artistic work, etc) is Ringtail Studios’ responsibility.

Q: Could you add a feature that allows you to gift or sell extra items in your inventory?
A: There are no plans to implement an in-game market or trade feature at the moment.

Q: Can we have sales in gm$ too?
A. Our stubborn devs only accept their salaries paid in em$, unfortunately.

Q: Why is it so hard to make money in the game?
A: There are plenty of species you can hunt to easily get some gm$, as well as missions, which is one of the fastest ways to earn gm$ in theHunter Classic! Also please keep in mind that we strive to recreate a realistic hunting experience in theHunter Classic, and as in real-life, hunting animals requires patience, dedication, and skill.

Q: I would like to know why in the updates there are always changes in the performance of weapons, specifically rifles. Sometimes a gun was having an excellent performance starts to have a performance far below what it can offer?
A: We always make sure to announce any changes to weapon performance beforehand, and we focus on weapon balancing based on players’ feedback and our own research in order to ensure a long-lasting and fun experience.

Q: Can we have an anti-cheat system?
A: We already have a number of anti-cheat systems implemented. They are not 100% cheat-proof, but we are working on improving them.

Q: Will there be more events similar to the Halloween event in the future?
A: Absolutely, and the next event is closer than you might think!

Q: What features may we expect in the future?
A: Sorry, but we don’t share future feature plans before we are absolutely sure that we are actually going to release them. We would rather surprise you, with a new feature than disappointing you with a missed release.

Q: Is it true that if you leave a buck alone in classic it will get bigger over time?
A: Some veteran hunters say there are a few 11 years old Whitetail bucks left in Whitehart Island, but no one knows for sure.

Q: Do you want to make the game compatible with Linux or consoles?
A: Never say never, but there are no plans for that in the nearest future.

Q: As I understand Classic comes into the late state of game life. Are there plans for Classic 2 or engine update?
A: This is a great question, and one probably best suited for Expansive Worlds though. As it stands now, we don’t have anything to report.

Q: How do you like your job and how is the team motivated with THC?
A: It can be very stressful at times, but what a great feeling it is to release new features and get positive feedback! I also love the THC community and try to chat here and there for a better understanding of players’ needs.

Q: What’s your favorite game other than Classic?
A: I am a bit of a nerd –- it’s Heroes of Might and Magic III.

Q: What are the barriers to improving the graphical appearance of Classic?
A: The main challenge is that THC is built on a game engine that is 10+ years old, and it would take a major effort to port the game to a more modern game engine. Having said that, computers have made giant leaps in performance during the game’s lifetime and we can now create models and textures that are significantly more detailed just because the average PC can handle them. At the same time, we are investigating which parts of the game engine can be improved, without an overwhelming effort and at the risk of introducing new bugs.

Q: What are your plans to attract more players/expand the player base? Also, how about improving the tutorial to guide new players?
A: Those are really close to the top of our list. We want to improve the whole process of getting new players into the game and then get them engaged as early on as possible. There are enough new players joining, but it can be difficult for them to stay due to the challenging gameplay. We want to help them by expanding the in-game help and improving the tutorials.

Q: Any chance we could get the new Huntermate to improve its usability? Any chance of getting range circles added to Huntermate? Would be handy to know if a call is 99m away or 101m.
A: The HunterMate already shows where the call is originating on the map, we want to leave some guessing up to the player as to how distant a call actually is. By the way, that’s totally a skill that can be learned with experience! Generally speaking, we are trying to avoid giving too much “hi-tech data” to the player in order to keep the hunting experience more challenging and true-to-life.

Q: Do you hunt IRL?
A: No, unfortunately not, I am too lazy for that 🙂

Q: Can you discuss the new team’s makeup/structure? Don’t need specific names for those that don’t want them shared, but a loose org chart & general job descriptions.
A: The team size is variable and it is not always a great representation of the support we provide for the game. We have a Producer (myself) responsible to keep the ball rolling, a Game Designer (Pucu) who is in charge of many things (sometimes too many), Programmers, 3D/2D Artists, Animators, and QA Testers (both for art and functionalities).

Q: Can you discuss the new team’s philosophy? I’ve noticed this team focusing a bit more on bugs than the previous team. And a few new items. I find that refreshing. I assume we can expect some more new things, but can we also expect fixes and enhancements to existing items & systems?
A: We want to keep a balance between new content, new features, and bug fixes. I think it is quite noticeable if you check the release notes for the past 6 months. You may have also noticed that we’ve already fixed dozens of legacy bugs as well as issues introduced by content we added recently. Quality continues to be a focus for us, and we will continue to polish the game and fix bugs. Together with new content and features, of course.

Q: Does the overall philosophy lean toward more realism, or less realism / more ‘gamey’?
A: Realism. I love how hardcore this game is and we will do our best to keep it like that.

Q: Any plans to improve the User Interface?
A: Yes. We already cleaned up different areas of the website/launches as well as added a search field to the store, fixed the Personal Bests section etc. There is still a long list of improvements that we will take care of during the next year to make your life easier.

Q: What is the most enjoyable part of your job?
A: To start with a general idea, move it to a detailed plan, get through the whole long process of creation and implementation, and finally see it in-game –- that’s a fantastic feeling I cannot even express in words. And then to read the comments after release –- no matter if it’s criticism or praise. For example, the Snow Goose went through a long design process: from the idea to choose this particular species among all others to the massive amount of iterations to fix the model and its animations. But what a great feeling it was to finally see them flying across the WRR. It took some more time before we finally “taught” them not to fly under the snow though 🙂 But once we finally released them – I was over the moon!

Q: What is the most challenging part of your job?
A: To try to make every player happy. Sometimes it feels a bit like Don Quixote fighting windmills, but I like to think we are achieving that goal overall.

Q: Do you play the game yourself? If yes, what do you like most? What’s your most favorite animal to hunt in this game?
A: Unfortunately, I lack the main skill for this game -– patience. Therefore, I prefer to hunt waterfowls, as I am fully relaxed there. As for the favorite animal –- I would like to say Turkey, but I would be biased as our team created it. So I am going to say the Rocky Mountain Elks, as I really like its look and behavior in the game.

Q: What’s your best bug solving story? Any behind the scenes on this time-consuming task?
A: While trying to fix the infamous “harvesting bug” we spent days and days killing Dall Sheep (which had been reported as the most frequent species to have this problem) to try and reproduce the bug, which seemed absolutely random. We failed to find the exact steps to reproduce it, but found some hints that the problem could somehow be caused by the spawning engine. Devs reworked a big piece of code and after a few days of testing, we were not able to reproduce the harvesting bug anymore. Minor detail though, we forgot to test it in multiplayer, which of course got broken by our fix! We had to revert our release and start the investigation all over again, as it turned out that our initial guess was wrong. A week and a huge pile of Dall Sheep bodies later, we finally narrowed down the bug’s cause –- a minor mistake in the back-end which was fixed and re-tested in one day.

Q: Will the competitions be reworked? It’s more of the same with all the comps at the moment.
A: Yes, we have plans to do that for 2021. Competitions will be reviewed, amended (if necessary), and rescheduled (hopefully new trophies will be added too).

Q: If you could snap your fingers and magically achieve one thing for the game, what would it be?
A: A new reserve would be fun!

Q: I would like to ask you if this season is going to end shortly or, rather, in several months?
A: Season changes will be automated and each season will last three months.

Q: Coolest / memorable place you’ve ever visited or want to visit?
A: I really want to travel through South America one day, as I’ve never been there.

Q: Are you a dog person or a cat person?
A: I am allergic to cats, so have no choice. I had a German Shepherd which I loved – I still miss her.

Q: How many bugs in the current database?
A: There are quite a few of them… 🙂 We’re aware of most bugs and actively working on addressing them.

Q: Are you Russian?
A: Yes, but I left Russia in my youth in 1993.

Q: Will the trophy lodges ever get an update. Possibly bigger, new design, etc?
A: It’s in the plans, but only as an idea at the moment. We know we should do it at some point.

Q: Will there be fishing in this game ever?
A: In order to implement fishing in a way that we’d deem satisfactory, we’d have to divert effort and resources that we’d rather use to improve the core (hunting) part of the game.

Q: Will you ever add more travel missions to the game?
A: Yes, soon. We already have plans for at least two of them.

Q: Will there be any suppressors/silencers in-game in the future?
A: We are considering the idea, but generally speaking this is something that could imbalance the gameplay, which is something we are trying to avoid.

Q: What’s the most impressive/rare animal you’ve ever harvested in-game?
A: While we were testing the Summer Fiesta mission packs, I was stuck with one of TreeKiwi’s missions –- harvesting a Rocky Mountain Elk that scores over 390. I harvested over 150 Elks (using our internal dev-tools to speed-up testing) but none of them were even close to 390! At some point, I gave up and decided to rest and hunt without dev-tools to relax a bit. Lo and behold –- the second Elk I bumped into was a 439 pointer!

Q: What is the one feature you would like to add to Classic but which you know would not be possible due to the engine.
A: VR.

Q: Are there any features in Classic that you would like to see removed or completely overhauled?
A: Fast traveling. As a fan of realism in the game, I am not a big fan of the idea of fast traveling every 30 minutes. Don’t let this answer scare you though– – rest assured that we do not have any plans to change that in any way.

Q: When the bug with .308 will be finally fixed?
A: Sorry, what bug again? 🙂 P.S. It’s been fixed now!

Q: Why 16 GA Side by side shotgun does not support Slugs.
A: The real-life weapon we used as a reference for the classic 16GA shotgun did not support slug ammo, so we decided to exclude it to maintain realism.

That’s it for now! Thanks again, and sorry if your question wasn’t answered. Until next time!

Discussion

Preamble

Trophy Lodges have been on our agenda for ages. When I say for ages, I really mean for ages. The very first mention of it on the forum goes back almost to the beginning of theHunter, year of 2008. Since then suggestions of some sort of trophy room have been popping up regularly, both in the forum and in our surveys where they always ended up in top tier of the most desired features. Despite this, the idea of the trophy room kept being moved down on priority list in favour of less daunting features. It felt like too huge an endeavour for a small and lean team as ours has always been, so the risks of commencing on such an adventure have been outweighing the expected rewards, and the trophy room post-it kept being put aside, time after time. Until December 2016.

Brainstorming

Trophy Lodge – first draft

Back then we gathered together for one of our brainstorm session to nail down what we would be working on in the upcoming year. Those sessions usually happen twice per year and are fun (and sometimes slightly crazy) discussions where everyone throws in ideas and we all talk tech, feasibility, community reactions and many other factors that need to fall together for a new feature to make its way to the roadmap. That time our 3D artist Mattias drew a fireplace with an antler rack above on a post-it and showed it to us as a first concept of a trophy room. Although usual concerns being brought up (Can we even do it on our engine? How long will it take? Where can we cut corners? Shall we take a “lighter” approach?), all of us got super inspired by the image of a cozy “room”, filled with gorgeous animal trophies and memories that are unique for each and every player. We looked at each other and said “what the heck, let’s do this, and do it right”. And so it began.

Design

Patrick Enz, Game designer

The work, as usual, started with putting the vision into design, compelling and comprehensible both for the team to work on and the players to follow. Our game designer Patrick took a first stab at it in January 2017 and it took at least a month of team brainstorms, multiple amount of changes and adjustments before we all felt that we have something we could work with. During those early meeting sparks would fly, not once but often our lead programmer Roberto would have to flush his infamous black book with the huge NO sign on it (when the rest of us went a bit too wild in our imaginations), but in the end we all managed to achieve something we could unite behind and what is, more or less, what you see released today, although we ended up changing, adding and cutting quite a few things as the development progressed.

From a game design perspective the biggest challenge was coming up with a gameplay loop that felt right and true to theHunter, which would encourage players to get their trophies taxidermized. With Patrick at the steering wheel we broke the whole design into small pieces and discussed how to tackle the amount of rooms, how it will all work in multiplayer, how to solve the placement of trophies, what to do with the indoor lighting, something we have never had in theHunter before, and other stuff. In general, in the game design we tried to find the balance between offering our players as much freedom as possible in using this feature while maintaining a strict gameplay framework which would make it possible for us to implement it technically. One example of such balance has been the decision to go for pre-set plaques and platforms and divide all our existing animals between them.

Trophy Manager – Design

“My favorite part with working on this amazing new feature”, Patrick says, “was when we finally were able to add taxidermied animals to the Trophy Lodge itself. It sort of felt like playing The Sims again but with a hunting mindset. Being able to place melanistic variations of animals all around my lodge gave me a satisfying feeling since melanistics are just awesome. Otherwise having the honor to create the initial representation of the lodge was an amazing opportunity since I saw it as my first step into the deep and complex field of game design itself.”

Art

Mattias, 3D artist

Johan, 3D artist

In the meantime our 3d artists Mattias and Johan started to work on the concept art for the Trophy Lodge itself. There were simple drawings picturing the layout and general look and feel. The initial plan was to create two different styles at the release, but due to time limitations we had to focus on one, the Classy style.

Mattias created a mock-up model of the entire lodge in the game to get a sense of scale and try out how animal trophies would fit. This was our first challenge, and in the end he had to increase the initial room space several times, because trying different animal sizes really made the room look small. Some of the antlers are huge!

Once the mock-up was nailed, Mattias and Johan made a long list of art assets that would be present in the room and assigned each of those priorities. So, walls and floorings would be on top of it, whereas the whisky and cigar corner, something all of us really wanted to see in the game, was cut due to time constraints.

Trophy Lodge – First sketches

After all the assets were finished the artists ran into another curveball. They had to re-furnish the room, trying to make it large enough for all the big animals (they were taking the largest animal per species as a benchmark) and look cozy at the same time. The most challenging task was definitely to scale the lodge correctly. Mattias and Johan had to go through several different mockups of room layout and size before it finally felt good. And even after they started asset creation they had to go back and scale the room further. Always larger.

The final step, if one doesn’t count bug fixing, was to create a “bake” for the static light, which is making a black and white texture with lighting information. After that it needs to be applied to the scene; the furniture, the walls and floor. This really helps everything go together better.

Trophy Lodge – Icons WIP

When asked about his favourite thing about working on the Trophy Lodge, Mattias says, “The best part was a certain point in the development when I felt we really had something going on; and that was when we made a small video for an internal presentation! Every visual bug was sorted out and it really felt like we had a chance to get it right. Work-wise I also appreciated working with rendering the lights for the room.”

Animation

Moe, Animator

From the animation side, Moe’s task was to pose all our existing animals on their respective plaques and platforms. Sometimes it was challenging to fit some animals with large antlers on their large wall plaques while still maintaining a good looking pose for smaller antler and animal variations, as those plaques are very versatile and can fit smaller deer to larger ones. That’s why when placing your trophies with huge antlers on the wall plaques, you would need to be smart where to mount them.

In the beginning we decided to go for just one pose per animal to save some time and work, but about a month ago Moe suggested we try to add support for multiple poses to make things more versatile. Our programmer Patrik tried it out and managed to get it done in a couple of hours, that’s why now you are able to switch between 3 poses per animal, and some of them have 5.

Client code

Roberto, Client programmer

Patrik, Client programmer

Robin, Client programmer

When we started to work on the Trophy Lodge we knew that it would bring a lot of technical challenges, and it did.

The first problem we needed to solve was the Trophy Animal system. Specifically, how to reuse the most from the animals we already have in the game, being able to recreate the very same beautiful antlers, at the same time saving as little data as possible on the server side.

As this entity is something new for our code (we have items, animals, critters, all with their own specifics, but nothing that would combine characteristics of both animals and items), we had to create a new one. In the end we managed to create a new kind of item – TrophyAnimalItem – that bring all of this with it, saving only a few magic numbers for the antlers and avoiding to change anything in the current animal and population system. Patrik did an amazing job creating a dedicated loading system for the TrophyAnimalItems, making it easy to expand and maintain.

Along with the new type of item came the way of managing the Trophy Lodge itself with all the trophies and the dynamic plaques. Roberto and his team created a file where the designer and artist would bind the plaques and platforms in the settings with the real object in the game, managing to enable only those that are actually used. All of this is then synced with the back-end and the new Trophy Manager interface that Luna created.

At this point we had to establish communication with the server to be able to update the status of the lodge with all the animals at their right places with their right textures and poses if one leaves the Trophy Lodge. To do this, Roberto and Luna decided to create a .json file with all the information about the animals in the lodge. When the game client loads the lodge it sends the request to the server about the updated lodge data and then recreates the trophy animals with all their poses on the fly.

Trophy Lodge – Early stage of development

To place your animal in the Trophy Lodge you need to be able to taxidermize it, so Robin created a smart system that manages communication with the server, the interface and the way the client stores the data for the animals we harvest. We had to make some changes to the harvest flow, specifically in the trophy shot system, but in the end it was absolutely worth it.

When everything for a real Trophy Lodge experience was in place code-wise, the client programmer team focused on the multiplayer functionality, like the synchronization of the position of the players, so that different players can be in different lodges at the same time without clashing together or seeing each other. We ran into a whole bouquet of issues here, both related to fast-travelling and collision hiccups, but in the end, with a lot of effort and passion we managed to nail them, hopefully all 😉

As always, there is stuff that could be improved and things that we could add but we laid out a very solid foundation and are really happy that we managed to solve all the tech challenges which, historically, is something that has been holding us back the most.

Backend code

Luna, Backend programmer

Luna’s part in the project has been quite significant too. On her plate there were:

• Server (both engine configuration, tracking taxidermy data and tracking lodge data)
• Game UI (lodge selection and trophy manager, as well as linking things with the client)
• Launcher (fridging functionality)

The main issue was time, and the amount of things that needed to be done. Thankfully, Luna managed to maintain a good pace and get everything finished and polished up a few days before our planned release date.

For the Game UI, we decided that starting fresh with a new codebase for those particular UI panes would be a good idea, it was a lot of fun making those from scratch with more modern code and a new way of working.

Beyond that, the server bits were rather interesting, it might not look like it, but the server has to do a lot of work and tracking behind the scenes to make sure everything stays consistent and everyone gets their trophies.

Result

As you can tell from the above, what we are hyped to present to you today is the result of many months of hard work by the whole team. Sometimes we didn’t know whether we would pull it off at all, sometimes we ran into a brick wall and had to engage all the creativity we had to get out of horrible situations. Some things got waived and scraped along the way, some things were added, some things were left out for future iterations, and we really hope we will have them one day soon! All in all, we are extremely proud of what we have achieved as a team and we hope you will use the Trophy Lodges, fill them up with your proud trophies and feel the love and care we poured into it.

Future

We hope that the story of the Trophy Lodge in theHunter doesn’t stop here. We already have some plans for some future iterations and additions. What are they? You tell us! We are looking forward to continue developing this awesome feature together with you.

Discussion

Background

For quite some time many players have been reporting issues with the baiting system in theHunter, chief among the symptoms being a lack of activity at bait sites. Although not an opinion shared by everyone, it seems the general consensus among the active community is that the system was altered and “broken” at some point. Some players still enjoy acceptable and in some cases generous yields at their bait sites, while others have no such luck. This inconsistency, especially for those adversely affected, has cast a shadow over the value bait sites add to the game.

Overhaul

The good news is we have spent a great deal of time reworking the system and are pleased to introduce brand new, simplified baiting mechanics. We consulted a small panel of trusted advisors from within the community during the game design review process and we feel that the new system offers a balanced and reasonable compromise. Please read this document carefully as it contains important information about how the new baiting system works, how it compares to the old system, and what players should expect in terms of results. It is important to emphasise at this stage that the old system generated far more baited animals at bait sites than Expansive Worlds ever intended from a game balance perspective in the original game design. For that reason, players should not expect the new system to be comparable.

The “Good” Old Days

The activity at a bait site in the old system was determined by a lot of variables, most of which the player had no knowledge of, or control over. For example when a feeder was placed in a reserve, the client determined how much of the attraction zone (imagine an invisible circle around the feeder) overlapped the spawn map (imagine invisible patches on the map where species can spawn) for the species in question. The result was a figure from zero to 100, based on the percentage overlap. So if approximately 75% of the feeder overlapped the spawn map for that species, the maximum attraction level that feeder could ever reach would be 75. That is just one example, there were many other variables involved, making the system utterly complicated.

Simplify

One of the objectives when setting out to rework the baiting system was to simplify it. Not only to make the experience for the players more consistent and hopefully more enjoyable, but to make the system easier to debug, maintain, and further develop in the future. To simplify the system, some important decisions were made which have changed how baiting works now. We understand that some players may have preferred a more complex system which had a lot of unknown variables resulting in unpredictable behaviour, but it is our hope that the new system will offer better value without removing all of the challenge from baiting.

Attraction

The new system no longer has any concept of attraction, formerly a number between zero and 100. A feeder now has a status, and this can either be “active”, “inactive”, or “penalty”.

• Active: The feeder contains bait and is capable of baiting species.
• Inactive: The feeder may or may not contain bait but is incapable of baiting species.
• Penalty: The feeder is currently disabled because a baited animal was shot at the site.

When you place a new feeder in a reserve and add some bait to it, the initial status of the feeder will be inactive, for a period of 4 hours (real time). During that four hour period, the feeder will not bait any animals. After the 4 hour “warm-up” period, the status of the feeder will change to active and two things will happen; the bait will start to deplete and the feeder will be capable of baiting animals.

If you let a feeder run out of bait, the next time you add bait the 4 hour “warm-up” period will start again. This can be avoided by keeping feeders topped up with bait at all times. Topping up a feeder which already contains bait does not restart the “warm-up” period. A feeder that is kept topped up with bait will always remain active and capable of baiting animals.

If you shoot a baited animal near a feeder, a 30 minute (real time) penalty is applied to that feeder. During this time the status of the feeder will change to penalty, and the feeder will no longer bait any animals. After the 30 minute penalty period, the feeder will return to active status and will start baiting animals again. The penalty cannot be circumvented by ending the current hunt and starting a new one. In a multiplayer game, only the host can invoke the penalty by shooting a baited animal at a feeder.

Bait Consumption

This aspect of baiting has also been simplified. Bait is now consumed in a constant linear rate, whereas before it was determined by the attraction level of the feeder. The bait consumption rate is 10 units every 24 hours (real time). That means a full feeder will run out of bait exactly 5 days after being topped up.

Location, Location, Location

The location of your feeders still matters, and for that reason we have simplified this process too. Now, if you attempt to place a feeder in a location where the corresponding animal does not spawn, you will not be able to and will receive a message to this effect. This is to avoid a situation where a feeder generates no activity. This does not mean location becomes irrelevant. Some locations will still generate better results than others. This is when it becomes important to discuss locations with hunting buddies and fellow community members.

Expected Numbers

For most players an important question now will be “how many bears or hogs can I expect to see at my feeders now that the system has been overhauled?”, and the answer is, it still depends on location. The new system has been written in such a way that results should be more consistent. If you place a bear feeder in the same location as your hunting buddy, you should see pretty similar results in most hunts. There will always be variations in activity due to the random nature of the spawning system which theHunter uses, but in general results should be more predictable.

Existing Feeders

If you have an existing feeder and want to start using it again, all you have to do is add some bait. Depending on the current location, you may want to consider moving it if you feel the area is not optimal. Once you add bait to an empty feeder, remember the 4 hour “warm-up” period will start and during this phase the status of the feeder will be inactive.

If you already have feeders with bait in them, please remember that the new system is now in place and consequently, you may notice differences in the rate of bait consumption. This is particularly true if you have a feeder in a bad area which previously resulted in a low bait consumption rate. The result is a possible drop in bait in some feeders. This is not a bug and is to be expected in some cases. Unfortunately this is unavoidable but should balance out in the long run.

Technical Overview

Roberto (our lead client programmer) and I were tasked with the baiting system overhaul, and neither of us had any idea how the previous system worked, or what would be involved in beating it into shape for the new design. As is the case with many things in theHunter, it was far more complicated than it perhaps needed to be, and everyone who had ever touched the system before had either left the company, or left the team to work on other projects and probably forgot the words “baiting system” forever.

Björn Öjlert, the original game designer now working on theHunter: Call of the Wild, kindly gave us valuable feedback on how the original system was supposed to work, which helped us understand the reasoning behind some of the existing code. Needless to say though, it was still akin to wading through porridge, at least in the beginning.

The baiting system, from a technical perspective, is essentially a combination of interactions between client and backend. When you start a hunting session, the client requests information from the backend. Included in this data is information for each feeder on that reserve, including a series of timestamps (when the feeder was placed, when bait was last added, and so on), information about how much bait is in the feeder now, how much bait was in the feeder after the last fill, and more. During the hunt, any interactions with a feeder by the player (e.g. moving a feeder, placing a new feeder, filling a feeder, shooting a baited animal at a feeder) result in calls to the backend API to update the data for that feeder.

When you open the launcher and view a reserve map on which you have a feeder, a similar API call is made to the backend to obtain information for that feeder, which drives the mouse-over pop-up box containing the feeder’s status and bait level.

Final Thoughts

As with any change to a system which has been in place for a considerable amount of time, we acknowledge that these changes will evoke various reactions. Some might find the new system too simple; others might welcome the change and consistency. We endeavoured to find a compromise and we are happy with the results.

From a development point of view, we have made good progress and taken a big step forward in terms of understanding how the baiting system works. Very little of the original backend code remains, and what exists now has been optimised. We now have a solid platform upon which we can build in the future, and one which made adding the goat mineral feeders far easier than it would have been with the old system.

We can now, without any shadow of a doubt, say “the baiting system works exactly as designed”. We hope you enjoy the new system.

Discussion

Last week we released Hunter Score 2.0. From a backend perspective, this was the biggest change we’ve had in quite a while, and it touched quite a few systems. For those that don’t know the details from a game design perspective, please refer to Alena’s post.

In this blog post, I will discuss what has been done from a technical perspective.

Preamble: theHunter’s server architecture pre-Hunter Score 2.0
Before I can explain how the new architecture looks, I would like to go over how the old (and current, mostly, see further) architecture works and is set up. We’ll do this back to front, meaning we’ll discuss the layer the furthest away from the player first.

– _Storage_: The SQL database: We use google Cloud SQL to store all the data related to the game, nothing special here, Google takes care of our database, it’s mostly stable.

– _Caching_: Google App Engine’s managed Memcache, with 10GB of dedicated memory.

– _Servers_: Google App Engine (PHP and Python): This is where it gets more challenging. We use Google App Engine to serve the website, as well as the API for the game. The website is a mix of PHP (inherited from the olden times before Expansive Worlds and Avalanche Studios owned theHunter) and html/css/javascript. The API servers meanwhile are written in Python 2.7, both the PHP and Python code are running on App Engine, and connect to the Cloud SQL database and memcache.

– _Cloudflare_: Cloudflare provides an additional layer of caching, it will cache static files such as images, html, css and javascript files, so our web server does not get swamped.

– _Website/Launcher_: The html/css/js served by the web server will be rendered by either your browser, or the game launcher. It is a single page app built using pretty old versions of marionette/backbone frameworks(the ones released back when the website was built).

Challenges
There are several pieces in this stack that are posing challenges for us in the dev team, the main one being the current server/web stack.

– These old versions of marionette and backbone are incredibly verbose and troublesome to work with, making any web changes slow and hard to test.

– The App Engine servers have no unit tests nor automated integration tests, this makes them prone to breakage, especially with the weakly typed languages that are being used.

– The servers have no sane error checking, making it impossible to tell the difference between a user sending an incorrect request and genuine server errors, this makes logs dramatically less useful than they should be.

– Database consistency was not considered during its development, meaning that errors can sometimes cause data corruption, which burdens both the players and our support team.

– Much of our static game data (such as which achievements are available to players, which animals spawn where, etc.) are stored in JSON files. While this is a practical format for developers, these files are most often changed by the game design team, this leads to occasional breakage whenever a single comma or quotation mark is forgotten.

What we’re moving towards
With the release of HS 2.0, we made the first steps towards improving on all this to move towards a more stable server architecture. The idea is that we will minimize the amount of changes made to the Python/PHP servers and instead start building on a new server stack, written in Go and hosted on Google GKE (Google Container Engine: A Managed Kubernetes cluster).

How does this improve on our problems, and why aren’t we just fixing the current servers instead? Well, I’m glad you asked, there are several reasons:

1) The main and most important reason is that, to fix the current servers, we’d need to rewrite them anyway, a lot of individual pieces are poorly designed (from a technical POV) and exhibit unexpected and undocumented behaviour in many cases. Writing new pieces and making sure they are well documented and don’t exhibit such undocumented behaviour solves this issue.

2) Weak typing and lack of unit tests: Python and PHP are both weakly typed languages, combined with the lack of unit tests, this makes any large refactoring or change extremely prone to breakage and passes the whole burden of ensuring correctness for any change onto the QA team, this is not sustainable. Rewriting piece by piece from scratch and making sure we have good unit tests coverage and use a strongly typed language for the new pieces solves this issue.

3) This allows us to move static game data to an administration panel, much easier to use by the game design team.

Upgrade approach
We are not going to be rewriting the whole server stack in one go, this would take months if not years, and would completely stop development of new features.

Our path forward consists in rewriting piece by piece as we make new features, the first step in this was made with the release of HS 2.0, we’ve moved the achievement system from JSON files to our administration panel, we’ve made an administration panel for ranks, and we’ve written an entirely new server for all of it that is now hosted on kubernetes. The new achievement and ranking system does API calls to our new servers written in Go, which are hosted in a kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud.

Compared the the Python servers, we’ve already noticed a huge increase in stability and performance compared to the old, the logging is also much better and they have full unit test coverage.

Hope this was of some interest to you. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask! I am looking forward to working towards a more stable and faster theHunter experience.

Discussion