Happy 4th of July!

So we’re a bit late with this weeks status update, and we’re sorry about that. Today’s update will be short and sweet due to us being terribly busy.

It’s the fourth of July so we thought that, especially our players from the US, would appreciate a free USA t-shirt. It’ll only be free to the players who log in today. We will however sell it in the store at a later date. (The shirts will be delivered over time today. We can’t do all nationalities but we’ll release some every now and then)

We’re getting a lot of questions about when we’ll release the fox. We’re happy that you are eager, but unfortunately we feel that we need more time to tweak and polish it. So please bear with us.

Happy hunting!

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Time flies, and its´already Wednesday again which means another status update!

Apart from further bug fixing on both the game client and the servers work is being done on a few other things. Last week we mentioned the Red Fox, which is now pretty much finalized by the art department. Here´s a picture showing what the most common color variation will look like. What “rare” variations will be included will be reserved for those lucky hunters who spot them in the game as they are released!

Red Fox Work in Progress

As you may also know that we´re working on adding proper first person animations to all the weapons. A feature that we choose to leave out for the multiplayer release, and which has spawned a lot of both positive and negative opinions. But of course, now that we have the “holstering” function there´s no reason for not having the weapons clearly visible on the screen for those who like that, and if not only for the simple reason that you should definitely be able to see all the swag you buy at the store. As we replaced the old character “rig” (the floating arms and torso) with our full body character there´s some new things that we also have to take into account as we make the new animations. As unfortunate as it is we can´t simply convert the old animations to the new system as the animations are inherently liked to the old skeleton/rig that was used. Below is an image showing the angle of rifles that we´ve found to work quite well. It´s only a little different compared to the old animations, but we´trying to find a slightly better balance as the weapon should not take up neither too much or too little space on the screen. It should also feel lite you´re holding the weapon in as an natural pose as possible while still being able to see it.

.300 Rifle view

That´s all for this week. Happy hunting!

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Status update time! A little light today as we´re getting closer to that time of the year when people go on vacation and people will begin to drop off and come back within the coming weeks. Currently Pim is out of the office for two weeks getting some well deserved rest and family time. But that does not mean things will stop happening at the studio. As the multiplayer release is getting more and more stable we will start looking at what to do next, and we still make small tweaks here and there to make sure everything is running smoothly.

We have a bunch of new items in the pipeline, some of which will be announced before being released, and others being a surprise. The Red fox is being worked on and the art is getting near completion. We have implemented a number of points from the feedback we got from you guys and it should be quite hard to confuse the fox with any other animal at this point.

Also, we should mention that it´s Mattias (our master thesis student) last week at the office, and this is probably his last day, if the public transportation strike going on here in Sweden right now is still on tomorrow! For 20 weeks he has been working with mobile support for thehunter and it´s been a great experience having him on board. Time will tell how we might choose to use his work.

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Another Wednesday, another status update. As you might have noticed we’re killing bugs as fast as we can right now. We know there are more in there, so our focus is to continue to do that for as long as we need to.

We hear a lot of voices raised about the first person animations, we know some of you don’t like it as it is, but, as we’ve mentioned before, we’re working on remaking them. It will take time and we can’t release them one by one, so right now you just have to bear with us. But remember, good things comes to those who waits… 😉

Work on the fox is going well, but we still have a lot of work left before we can start testing it. We’ll let you guys know more at a later stage.

We would like to thank the fantastic people who helped us test multiplayer, the alpha and beta test teams. We would never have completed multiplayer as fast as we did without your help.
As a token of our gratitude we’ve awarded you with a special in-game item that only you guys and gals will ever receive. We know it’s not much, compared to what you have done for the game, but at least other players will be able to see that you were part of the team that made multiplayer happen when they see your avatar in theHunter.

We’d also like to thank all the members of the community who helped other players during the update. There were a bunch of you in the live chat and some have helped out on Facebook and in the forums. Having such helpful people in the community is such a great support for our small dev team.

We’ve also awarded Pioneers and Wardens with a special item as well, so others can see that you, back in the days, were early supporters of the game and are still around.

Happy Hunting!

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Dear hunters,

So we launched multiplayer. We are so happy it’s finally out and we hope that most of you are so too. We know some of you guys don’t like changes, but in this case change was inevitable. Change isn’t always a bad thing and it helps if you are open and embrace it.

We know that there still are some bugs in there and, as we told you in a previous status update, we’ve planned to fix them now. Some of the bugs that might appear will only show up now when we get thousands of players coming in to play the game. Our aim is to fix them as soon as we possibly can. So bear with us while we fix them. Today we’re releasing a new Launcher that will help us finding bugs and other issues.

We don’t see the release of multiplayer as us being finished just because it’s released, but rather the start of a new era. A new era containing a lot of improvements of the game and new features. So please don’t focus on finding changes you don’t like, but rather embrace what cool new features are there and how you can re-explore a world of hunting you’ve learnt to like and even love.

We’d like to thank Pratze, with friends, who made a fantastic multiplayer trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p2e_7z_jiA) and BillytheCrayon who made great informative videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YhCueAuf8g) of the changes that came with multiplayer. We’d also like to thank all you fantastic people who helped out and seeded the torrent when we got overloaded, and all of you who helped other players when they had problems with the download.

I, Pim, would also like to, publicly, thank the team for the outstanding effort this has been.  I’ve never worked with such a dedicated and talented team before. What you guys have achieved is amazing. The number of hours you’ve put in is just crazy and I hope you feel that it was worth it. A big thanks goes to the team members families who have had to put up with a lot of absence. I hope you understand that Expansive Worlds and our community needed some extra time from them for a while. Thank you all!

A lot of the answers to the questions regarding changes after the release of multiplayer can be found here (e.g. first person animations):
https://news.thehunter.com/multiplayer-update-changelog/ (please read it through)

The most common problems people have come across seems to be the following:

Torrent problem
Possible solution: Delete the torrent folder where the game is installed (default: C:\Program Files (x86)\theHunter) and launch the Launcher through the game site

Settings problem (error 16008)
Solution: Change settings in the launcher (upper right corner) and save them.

The launcher shows a red error message saying “Error 16009 – Graphics card does not support D3DQUERYTYPE_EVENT”
It could be that your graphics card is not supported. You will need another graphics card to play the game. 

Happy Hunting!

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Dear Hunters,

It’s status update time again and we have so many cool things cooking right now.

First, we like to, once again, apologize for the downtime the past weekend, we know the added days to your memberships won’t make up for the loss of precious theHunter time. We hope that as many of our free members as possible seized the opportunity to try out all the reserves when we gave you two days of full memberships.

We have a new team, temporary, member. Her name is Palina and she’ll be helping us out for a few days. She’s shown great interest in our animals, so she’ll intially help Peter and Tomas out in creating the fox.

In last weeks status update we mentioned that we’ve been working on a new logo. We can tell you that it is finally done. This is what it looks like:

And here is a screenshot of how the new logo will look like on the new loading screen:

The reason for a new logo/identity is that we feel that with multiplayer theHunter is entering a new phase and we want to show that visually in the games identity. As you can see we’ve kept some elements from the first logo, from 2009, just to keep the connection to our heritage. The new logo will be rolled out over time so we won’t change it on the website until the new site is launched.

So what about multiplayer? We’re very close now. There are still a few bugs that needs to be squashed and some additional polish to be done. But it booth looks and feels pretty awesome. At least from our perspective. Our fantastic team has put in an incredible amount of work into multiplayer almost working 24/7 for the past months. So bear with us, good things are coming, but we need to make sure it’s good enough to release.

We got a package today. It’s a new “toy” that we are somewhat excited about. Below is a picture of Danny trying it out. We will tell you a bit more about later, but we’re interested in knowing what you, who know what it is, think about it. Would it be a good addition to theHunter experience?

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Howdy hunters,

Another Wednesday has arrived so it’s that special time of the week again: Status Update!

At the moment most of us are working our bu**s off so we can ship multiplayer as soon as possible.

Our client developers, Andrés and Daniel, are going through data from our alpha and beta testers and fixing bugs in an impressive pace.

Tomas and Peter, our art team, are busy working on the new third person characters  outfits, environment tweaks and lots of other art related stuff.

The animators, José and Hampus, are getting close to finish all new animations for weapons reloading and using equipment.

Björn is making sure game play is still as good in multiplayer as it is in the game today.

Robert, Herman and Emil are almost seeing the light at the end of the web site tunnel, so we’re getting relatively close now.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we can communicate a hard release date yet, since we still feel that we need more time to test it before we ship it. Saying that, we are aware that when we finally release the multiplayer version there might still be some bugs in there. This is, sadly, unavoidable, since some bugs will be so rare that we need tens of thousands of players for these to show up, but we’ve planned for bug crushing, and polishing, after the release. Our aim is always to have  an as bug free game as possible, even though some takes a long time for us to fix since some bugs difficult to recreate, as some of our more seasoned hunters have experienced over the years.

Here’s a sneak preview of what lifetime statistics will look like on the new profile pages:

We’ve gotten quite a few questions regarding if free members will be able to play multiplayer games. They will be able to join multiplayer sessions, if the creator allows that (it’s a setting when you create the game), but free members won’t be able to create their own sessions.

An exciting piece of news is that we’re working on a new theHunter logo. We feel that when multiplayer is released it should also be shown in our identity. Like a fresh new start. We’re close to finalizing it, so if you’re lucky you might see it in next weeks update 😉

Happy hunting!

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Status update time. A little late we know!

It would be quite wrong to say not much has happened since last week, because we´re pushing on toward the multiplayer release. Most things though are taking place “under the hood” and the biggest change is that we have now moved on from the initial alpha stage to a beta stage in development and testing. What this mean is that we now put most of our focus on fixing bugs and add the last touches to all the required features. All in all we´re making good progress.

For some weird reason we have also gotten quite into competing in the Lanebandit minigame that is available in your Huntermate. Perhaps you should all do some practice because we might just want to add a leader board on the website in the future 🙂

Also, thanks for the great and concise feedback on the Red Fox that was mentioned last week. Perhaps we should do this more often. As soon as work is commenced on the fox your pointers will be taken into account as far as possible with regard to certain technical limitations.

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Status update and feedback time!

Of course we are still very busy working on multiplayer. Right now our focus is reaching the “feature complete” stage where we stop adding new things and work primarily with getting everything already in there to work without problems, and also add the last touches to the graphics.

Red Fox work in progress

On Friday morning 08:00 CET we will perform a series of server upgrades, including physically moving all our servers to a new location within our current data centre and making infrastructure changes which will substantially improve our bandwidth and scalability capabilities. The website and forum will be unavailable during this time, for approximately one hour.

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Dear Hunters,

It’s another sunny day in Stockholm, so we’re quite happy here. Another great thing is that it’s Emil’s birthday today! So take the opportunity to congratulate him today.

This morning we got invaded by some builder that wanted to change some doors to a ventilation shaft in the office, so now we have two rather large grey steel doors in the office. It’s not very pretty.

We’d also like to remind you about the video competition. Deadline for entries is on Monday next week.

Almost everyone in the studo’s got full focus on multiplayer. So even though there was a bank holiday in Sweden yesterday, some of us were busy working, since we want it to be released just as much as you guys.

We’re getting a lot of questions about when multiplayer will be released, and to be frank, the only answer we can give right now is when we’re done testing and we have removed all known bugs. Due to the extreme focus on multiplayer we don’t have time for much else, so we hope you understand why we don’t have a lot of exciting stuff to tell you about. We will however show you a little preview of what the new map will look like:

One of the new cool features on the map is that, in a multiplayer game, you can draw, strategies for example, on the map so the other players in the session can see.

Happy Hunting!

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