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.

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.

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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Howdy Hunters!

We’re finally back from the Christmas vacations and, man, it feels good. We’re thrilled to tell you that we have grown – again! As many as three new people have joined theHunter team – Alena, who will be taking care of the community, a new Backend developer Adam, and a new intern Jonathan. Check out their stories below and give them a warm welcome in the forum.

We are very aware of the server issues and we’re working on fixing them as fast as we can. Herman and Emil has been doing some serious hardcore digging over Christmas to find the root of the evilness, and we’re now planning to move the game server to a more stable environment within a month or so. As a bonus, while digging, Emil and Herman has found a bunch of stuff, that they’ve fixed, that has had a positive effect on the games performance.

Alena

Hi there, my name is Alena Rybik and I am your new community manager, as apparently it has been already leaked 😉 I’ve been lurking in the forums for quite a while now and I have to say that I’m very happy and humbled to be working with such an amazing community. My plan (and my hope) is to develop theHunter’s community and the dialogue between the team and the players in an even more constructive and fun way. The community has been such a big part of theHunter’s development and this fact was actually the biggest selling point for me when deciding to take on this job.

A couple of words about myself: I was born and raised in Belarus, lived and studied in Germany before settling down here, in Stockholm. I love online communities, all things web, games and languages. When not hanging out on the Internets I spend time traveling, exploring Sweden, snowboarding (typing this with my left hand due to a broken right 🙂 and chatting to random people about life, the universe and everything.

I’d like to get to know all of you, so please do shoot me a PM if you have any questions, concerns or ideas, I’m the person to talk to and will be happy to do so. I still have to learn all the ins and outs of the game and the community, so please bear with me for the time being. Looking forward to this journey together with you!

Adam

Hi everyone, my name is Adam Svanberg and I’ve just started working on the Backend/Web team at Expansive Worlds. My academic background is in computational linguistics, and I worked a few years for a company called OpenAmplify, building a text analysis API. As I started getting more interested in general web development I moved on to an online marketing company, where we built all kinds of cool stuff using Python/Django. Off the clock, I used to spend most of my time either vacationing in an open world RPG, Skyrim obviously being my latest choice, or hacking away at some side-project. But for the last year and a half, free time is usually spent hanging out with my son Sam, who keeps me sleep deprived but happy.

Jonathan

Greetings!

My name is Jonathan, I’m joining the awesome team at Expansive Worlds as a creature artist intern.

For all my life I’ve had this strong fascination with nature, growing up we used to spend the summers in the Swedish archipelago, tenting and exploring the forests, this passion combined with my nerdiness for anatomy and artistry is what I hope will be reflected in the animals I’ll be making for the game.

With a background in fine arts and +5 years of art and sculpture studies, one of my main goals have been proficiency in human and animal anatomy, form and color – making the design as appealing and believable as possible. I love creating characters and creatures, this is something I’ve done since primary school, drawing and sculpting.

I’m looking forward to being part of the team bringing you new wildlife for this unique game experience.

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It’s been quite an exciting year for us here at Expansive Worlds. We’ve expanded the team, we released multiplayer, two new reserves, three new species and a bunch of new weapons and equipment. Based on the number of players we see in the game it seems as we’ve been working on the right stuff. We do know that there still are some bugs in the game, but we will continue to find and kill them as fast as we possibly can.

Most of us will now go on a well deserved vacation and come back next year, but a few will keep working over the Holidays. When we’re all back at the office we’ll start planning next years adventures in theHunter.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have played and enjoyed the game we love developing. A special warm thanks goes to our beta testers, our translators and of course our community moderators. We couldn’t do this without you guys and gals! And also all you YouTuber’s, creating fantastic theHunter videos, thanks and keep up the good work. We really appreciate your creations!

Next status update will most likely come in the beginning of January 2014.

Happy hunting holidays!

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It’s going to be a short status update this week, but I hope you can forgive us, we just have a lot to do right now as you can understand.

Christmas is around the corner and we’re in the final stages of testing the new reserve, Rougarou Bayou, and the new species, the mallard duck. It will be released as soon as we feel it’s ready to be released. We really hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Good things come to those who wait… TrackIR will be back soon! We’ve fixed it and it will be released together with the new reserve and the mallard duck. We’re sorry it took so long, but better late than never!

And also, don’t forget to join the theHunter 2013 Holiday Event!

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Dear Hunters,

We’ll start off with an apology, since we’ve been so terribly busy with the new reserve, new species and server fixes we didn’t have time to write a status update last week. We hope you’re not to upset about this.

Payment options
We know some of you are not very happy with the fact that mobile payments have disappeared in your countries and neither are we. We haven’t removed these on purpose, they were automatically removed due to the network operators not being able to support our price points with the new payment solution. We’re working on fixing this, but it looks like it will take some time. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s working again (hopefully soon).

Missing in action
Last week Robert left us to explore the world. Even though he moved to the other side of the Atlantic, he’s still within the company group working in Avalanche’s New York office. Robert will be replaced by a new star, Adam, within weeks, so we won’t lose too much momentum. Adam will hopefully not be too shy when he gets here and will introduce himself as soon as he’s started.

Server problems
We are well aware of the server disturbances some of you have experienced over the past weeks. It is the web teams top priority to fix these issues right now.

More pretty pictures
We appreciate all the great suggestions you all came up with for naming the new reserve. We’ve decided to name it Rougarou Bayou since we felt it was really suitable. You can read up on the two words here: Rougarou. Bayou

Say hello to my little duck
So that cat’s out of the bag. The new species will be the Mallard. So we’re introducing a completely new type of gameplay. For those of you who have hunted ducks in real life knows that it’s very different from e.g. hunting Pheasants. We’re super excited about ducks coming to theHunter and judging from some of comments we’ve seen in the forums so are some of you.

Happy hunting!

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It’s that time again and as fate, or rather careful planning, has it this status update correlates with the release of a new patch that adds a brand new feature to the game that should put a smile on the face stats loving players everywhere.

Before we delve deeper into the mechanics of this new mathematical wonderland we want to recognize the work of our programming intern Robin that made this new feature possible as an introductory task while learning our tools.

Now lets get into what this new stat is all about!

Harvest Value

Harvest value is a new way to score harvested animals that focus on how the animal was harvested rather than how it looks.

The aim of harvest value is to reward practices that lead to less animal suffering and that prevent unnecessary trophy damage. This is achieved by balancing two new stats against each other; Wound Time & Trophy Integrity.

It’s important to note that harvest value does not in any way replace the regular trophy score nor CSS (which is derived from the regular score).

Wound Time

Wound time is the time from first wound to death. To gain high harvest values you need to keep this time as low as possible which in turn means less animal suffering. The best wound time results are achieved through proper shot placement using a weapon with enough penetration to damage critical organs such as the heart and lungs. As most of you probably know by now a penetrated heart in theHunter leads to instant death which in this case means the best wound time that can be achieved, 0.

Values range from 0-infinite seconds where 0 is awesome and more than 60 is horrible.

Trophy Integrity

The second variable to make up harvest value is trophy integrity. Trophy integrity simulates how damaged the trophy is. The real life counterparts are things like meat, pelt and antler damage which lowers the monetary value of the harvest. Note that we use a simplified method to calculate this which means that it is not directly translatable to all real life situations.

Trophy integrity is affected by weapon type, distance to target and species. The rule of thumb is that the less damage the target takes the higher the integrity value.

Values range from 0-100% where 100% is awesome and 0% is horrible.

Balance Game

To calculate the final Harvest Value we simply multiply the two. This means that the highest possible harvest values can only be achieved when maxing both of them. This leads to a balancing game where you need to find the optimal caliber with just enough damage to take down the target as quickly as possible.

High caliber weapons are thus not suitable for small game (bad integrity & good wound time) while they excel vs. big game (good integrity & good wound time).

Low caliber weapons on the other hand are not suitable for big game (good integrity & bad wound time) while they excel vs. small game (good integrity & good wound time).

That’s nice but what is the point?

First of all we have a couple of fun new stats attached to each score sheet that you can marvel at. While this is enough for many players we do not stop there, we also plan to include this as a new condition for things like new competitions, missions and achievements.

Happy hunting!

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So it’s Halloween week and we’ve kicked off a week-long event. We’re really excited about this and we hope that you are enjoying it.

Exciting news, Pim managed to pass his Swedish hunting exam this Sunday, so he’s now free to hunt and purchase weapons for hunting (as soon as he’s gotten his licences approved by the police, something that usually takes 16 weeks when you live in Stockholm).

We’re wondering if we have any, preferably Swedish, hunters in our community that would like to donate any antlers or head mounts to us. We’d love to decorate the office walls with new friends for Hoggy and Roenny. We feel that we’re lacking a proper hunting feel in the office. Please PM a member of the dev team if you’d like to donate something.

Work on the new species and reserve are going as planned. We still have a long way to go before anything gets released. Andres and Daniel are working on the new AI, José is animating like a mad man. Peter and Tomas are creating new vegetation. Peter’s said that if you all behave he might show you some screenshots from the coming reserve next week.

Herman and Emil are looking into ways to speed up loading of the inventory. Something we hope will happen very soon, but we can’t promise anything just yet. And we’re also about to add more payment options, since we know that many of our players can’t purchase things in the game today due to our payment options not being available in your countries.

Happy hunting and beware of the beast bear!

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Today we released a new game update for all of you!

The main feature added today is the possibility to share your trophy shots on Facebook directly from the game client. All you need to do is check the check box you’ll see right before accepting the trophy picture. At the same time as adding this feature we have change the way you accept trophy shots a bit, instead of right or left clicking your mouse, now you’ll have to click on one of the two buttons on the screen, accept or discard.

You can connect your theHunter account with your Facebook account here. 

We’ve also added a new clothing line called “Casual”, featuring two t-shirts, two trucker caps and a pair of jeans. Hope you like them!

It’s a lovely, but cold, Wednesday in Stockholm. The fall is well on it’s way. We are settling in in the new office and the wild boar is finally up on the wall. So it almost feel like home now.

Winners
We’ve selected the winners in last weeks trophy shot competition. A big thanks to all of you who participated.  It seems as you liked the new feature.

We decided that all top three entries will receive the Laura Avatar. So the winners are (drum roll!!!):

Third place, who gets Laura Avatar + 500 em$, une

Second place, who gets Laura Avatar + 1000 em$: BambiGoHome

First place, who gets Laura Avatar + 1500 em$: Decoy13

The work on the new species is coming along as planned. We’re just mentioning it so you know what we’re working on, we still have a long way to go before it can be released.

We’re working on improving the GUI system (Graphic User Interface) right now. This will fix a bunch of GUI bugs and allow us to make other improvements and make it easier to add new features.

A new piece of hardware will be released very soon.

Happy Hunting!

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