Status Update

Finally Wednesday!

We have to start off with an apology, the promised game update won’t happen until tomorrow. We’re terribly sorry about this, but remember, good things comes to those who waits 😉

Our talented intern, Erik, wanted to share with you what he’s been working on.

Happy Hunting!

Erik:
Lately I’ve been working on improving the interaction between animals and environment, something that’s been pretty non-existing until now.
When this feature gets released (planned to be handed to you as soon as next week) you’ll find that there’s sound and visual effects when animals walks and runs through water and there will also be sound effects when they move through bushes.

You’ll be able to hear the sounds from a bit further distance than you currently can hear their footsteps from, but the visual water effects should be visible from quite a distance. Red Feather Falls will surely be the best place to experience these new effects so I highly recommend you to go on a hunt there once these features are released.

All this should not only make the game seem a bit more real, but also help you determine from what direction an animal approaches.
Who knows, this might even save a few lives from moose cows charging from unexpected angels!

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Status update

Another week has passed and we’re hoping that you hunters are still enjoying playing the game as much as we are developing it.

We had a small sale on em$ over the weekend, and we were happy to see that some of you took advantage of that offer. The countdown to Thanksgiving is up and running and we can see that a lot of you are in on the new competitions. We will end the week with a pretty pleasant surprise.

We’re spending a lot of time on preparing for the Christmas campaign that will be launched December 1st. We’re very excited about that and we hope you are too.

The next Game Update is scheduled for Wednesday next week and will include the Blacktail TruRACS update, and along with it also a new mission-pack for Blacktail!

And we just want to remind you all that the best Christmas gift to a loved one is a theHunter membership, so use the gifting option in the Hunter store to share the joy of hunting online 😉

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Status update

So it’s finally Wednesday again and time for an update.

As some of you might already have seen on Twitter and Facebook we were celebrating yesterday and the reason for this was the fact that we reached an important milestone earlier this week. TheHunter now has over one million registered players. This is truly an amazing achievement and we’re happy that our beloved game has attracted such a vast number of people. This doesn’t mean we’ll lean back and start taking it easy, but quite the opposite. Next milestone is 2 million registered hunters and we hope you, our dedicated community, will keep helping us reach that goal.

From what we can see a lot of you seems to be enjoying the new Tripod. We hope you are as satisfied using it as we were creating it for you.

We would also take the opportunity to thank all of you who have helped us out by completing the user survey. Your answers will help us in further development of the game.

The team is working hard on new content and features. We will have a TruRACS update fairly soon and we’re working on some new bow arrows to be released sometime in December. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US, so we will have an event starting next week based on that theme.

That’s all for this week, happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s Wednesday and time for the weekly update.

The past week has been a lot about on-boarding Pim, Herman and Christoffer, Expansive Worlds newest additions. All three of them are getting up to speed quickly.

We have, of course, also been busy preparing for this weeks update that will take place tomorrow. The update will not be big news to you since we’ve described both the Tripod and new skills system for tracking and spotting in previous status updates. But we are excited about getting your reactions and feedback on both of these new features.

For those that are interested in the details of the new spotting and tracking system more information can be found here:

A comparison between the Treestand, Groundblind and Tripod Stand has also been created here:

We´ve also started working on a holiday campaign that will be on during the whole of December, featuring events, sales and more. This campaign will be our biggest one to date and we hope you will like it.

Happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s wednesday again and time for this week’s status update.

We are quite busy right now with finalizing the Tripod as well as the development of the new skills system for tracking and spotting that was announced, fairly detailed, in the last status update. Both will be included in the next Game Update scheduled for release in next week!

New faces
We got some new faces on the team! Herman Nilsson joined us last week as Web Developer along with Christoffer Nyberg, Animator from our parent company Avalanche Studios, who will help us out for a period ahead. You will get to know both of them better later on in the Forums and in our Blog.
Also tomorrow a 3rd new person will join the team, but more info about that will be posted later this week.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s that time again!

Well, it was yesterday but we had to postpone because of personal related issues (the whole team went go-karting). Unfortunately no one thought to take a picture so you’ll have to take our word for it.

New Tracking & Spotting Abilities
Something that has been on the (in)famous TODO-list for a very long time now is to improve the skill system and therefore we are very pleased to announce that we are finally in a position where we can begin to tackle this.

There are many flaws with the current system including transparency (it’s unclear to the player how xp is earned and what the benefit of it is), xp being rewarded for the wrong things (shooting an animal multiple times gives more xp than a clean kill) and a general lack of a sense of progression.

What we are currently working on is the progression problem. By introducing a new set of unlockable abilities for tracking and spotting we hope that players will begin to feel that gaining levels actually do something.

For spotting this includes:

  • Random weight information that gets more accurate at higher levels
  • Random score information that gets more accurate at higher levels

And for tracking:

  • Random weight information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random track age information that get more accurate at higher levels
  • Random animal health information for blood tracks

In contrast to most of our current skill benefits these abilities will not increase incrementally with each level, but instead make larger jumps at specific levels. For instance you may unlock weight information with an accuracy of 20% at level 5 and then jump straight to 40% at level 10. The idea behind this is to make progression more noticeable, it also allows for more variation at each level since we can have, for instance, gender at level 6, weight at level 8 and weight at level 10.

Another cool thing specific to the tracking abilities is that we can now specify the track-types for which an ability works with at a specific level. For instance we can have weight information at level 5 from footprints only and then make it available for all track-types at level 10.

Once we getting ready to release this update we will post more specific information on what each ability does and at which level it is unlocked in the wiki. This will also include frequently requested information about current abilities and incremental improvements already available in the game.

This, however, is only a temporary solution to the transparency problem since we also plan to revamp the skill page attached to your player profile. The idea is to display both your current progression and information about what each level do in the same place. Imagine something similar to the achievement page.

That’s it for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

It’s Wednesday again and time for this week’s status update. Among other things we´re doing some “under the hood” work in places which unfourtunately make the status updates somewhat shorter.

New patch will be released later this week with some bugfixes – fix for animals not dropping clues after some time and shotgun sound fix.

Blacktail TruRacs improvements
Just like with the Mule Deer improvements that came with the last game update, we will soon start to work on a new larger antler model for the Blacktail to push it’s visuals closer to the actual scores too.

New reserve
Preliminary work has also been started on the next hunting reserve. At the moment things are in the evaluation stage where we are trying to ensure that we can actually reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves. This involves trying out some new types of vegetation and other work that we haven´t really done before. We hope that this one should offer something quite new once released, and also correspond to community wishes. We can also say that it is not an African environment we´re making, and for reasons we will get into later on (although an African reserve is not as far away into the future anymore as we have previously stated). This is also a very early announcement and work will be done in several steps with some other things in between until the release which is at the moment roughly scheduled for March next year.

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Status Update

It’s time for this week’s status update!

It’s a rather short update this week, we have been busy with previously announced tasks including the next Game Update that will be released tomorrow.

The update includes:
* Crash fixes
* Mule Deer TruRacs improvements – XXL antler added to give a better visual to score match
* Improvements to how animals leave clues
* Fix for bolt action rifle reload
* Fix for which fingers are used to hold the recurve bow arrow
* Muzzleloader iron sight better aligned

More info will be posted tomorrow with the update.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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Status Update

Status update time, again! So what´s up this week?

New Mule deer antler
The new and larger antler model for the Mule deer is almost ready for testing before being released. At the moment it looks pretty good and we really hope this one will satify the needs for a larger antler and push the visuals closer to the actual scores. For now only the Mule deer has been tweaked but as soon as we know this one is to the communitys liking we´ll add one for the Blacktail as well.

Mule deer model XL

Tripod
After doing some more planning for the autumn and early winter that´s ahead of us we aim for releasing the tripod in mid November. Unfourtunately the programming part of it will be pushed a little due to Erik being busy with other things for a while.

Patch
The next patch for the game will be out during next week which incluse some game crash and bug fixes, and an improvement to how animal tracks are being laid out. This improvement should make it a little easier to follow a trail as the amount of tracks increase slightly as an animal make turns along it´s path.

What else?
Erik is back on track now after his computer broke down last week. Pretty much exactly in time for Peters computer to break down, but fourtunatly it was only the video card that got tired and as we had one in stock (which mean another computer that is not used at the moment) it was an easy fix. Also last weekend Peter was out fishing by himself. He only caught one sad little excuse for a fish though which he let back into the water so don´t expect any bragging about that!

Howdyho until next time!

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Status Update

It´s Wednesday again and status update time!

First of all we´re really happy about the latest patch and the response to the Muzzleloader. We do hope all of you who didn’t comment on it is also enjoying it! We really feel like we managed to add something a little different to the game this time, and we’ve had some fun hunting with it here at the studio as well.

Nordic retail
theHunter will be out in Nordic retail stores around the 30th of September. Yesterday Robert and Peter had lunch with the guys at Wendros who is really happy about the product. The updated box (art) also came out looking really nice in print.

Muzzleloader competitions
New comps have been set up by Björn and the plan is having them up and running by next Monday after running through some testing.

Additional Mule Deer rack
We’ve started work on an additional antler model for the Mule Deer to attempt to satisfy the demand for an even bigger and thicker “world record” type of antler.

Tripod
Not much has happened with this one since last week. As soon as Erik has the time he will make the necessary tweaks to the code to get it working the way we want before we proceed to finalizing!

Parker Bow
Work on the new compound bow that was announced last week has been started, but no preliminary release date had been decided yet as there´s some other things being prioritized.

Other trivia
Yesterday Eriks computer decided it had enough of crunching numbers and gave him the blue screen of death instead of the normal Windows start up screen. A new computer is on its way and in the meantime Erik is working (sort of) on a temporary machine. Also our programmer Andres will have a few days off as he´s getting one of his front teeth fixed after a small biking accident he had a while back. And Peter has bought himself some gear and a fishing permit! A few members of the team was out on a great little fishing trip last weekend, which was all about catching fish, getting half lost and really wet in the woods and finally some beer and a great dinner! The full story will be up here soon!

Happy hunting until next week!

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