Features
- Added a new rare Kangaroo texture variation
Bug fixes
- Red Kangaroo model and texture tweaks
Game Update
Status Update
Hi there hunters,
Welcome to our weekly status update. Here is what’s been going on in theHunter.
Player survey
Last week we launched our player survey and since then we’ve been monitoring data from our players from all around the world – pretty exciting! This has been the most popular of our surveys, with about 5,000 hunters having submitted their replies so far. It will be open until the end of Monday, March 23rd, so if you haven’t already completed it yet, here’s your chance to be heard and influence the future development of the game.
St. Patrick’s Day Event results
Here is the final leaderboard of the event that ended on Tuesday, with players who collected the most amount of shamrock$ and finished top 10, congratulations guys!
- trancebabe – 45351
- zerohero555 – 45133
- tkaya – 40821
- SiiinysTer – 39193
- TROPICIEL3 – 29831
- corredorcorredor – 29829
- IJRI – 28112
- Paf_Paf – 27381
- Wulf 67 – 26594
- josepaco – 24119
We’ve also decided to give a special (surprise!) rainbow trophy to the hunters who have collected the highest number of pots of gold during the event but didn’t end up in top 10. Here are the most thorough gold collectors:
Agent441 – 434 pots of gold
Mrkurd – 298 pots of gold
jamesclavell – 222 pots of gold
CSS balancing
We received a fair amount of community critique during the St. Patrick’s Day event about CSS which is not accurately balanced. This results in waterfowl and rabbits disproportionately high CSS values. We hear you, appreciate this feedback and are looking to make adjustment to CSS system, so we can offer a properly balanced score system which will reflects the difficulty of harvesting quality animals within each category and rewards accordingly.
To make this happen, we’d like to ask you, our community, to help us collect data for us to analyze the existing holes in the CSS system and resolve them accordingly.
If you want to help us with that, here is what you should do:
- Create a multiplayer game, but play by yourself (so that you can keep a track of your CSS values more easily).
- (Important!) Only focus on hunting one animal.
- Take notes of the hunt duration, amount of kills and the total CSS that you’ve gained.
- Open the CSS Feedback form, choose the animal you’ve been hunting in the drop down menu and enter your data. Easy!
We’d really appreciate your input on this!
Say Hi to Paul
Meet another new team member – his name is Paul and he has recently joined our backend gang.
Hey all!
My name is Paul Kruitz, I have joined Expansive Worlds as a Systems Engineer. Which means I work on backend technology improvements for theHunter.
I hail from the Netherlands from a small town called Sittard. I went to the UK to get my uni degree to finally start my lifelong dream and make games. So far I have worked on CMR: DiRT2, DiRT3, DiRT Showdown, GRID 2 and Mad Max.
Outside of work I love to play games and travel to the far reaches of the planet and see how people live of there and experience new things
Kangaroo revamp
On a final note, a quick update regarding the red kangaroo model: we’ve collected some great feedback from our community members and our artists are now working hard to improve the model, based on your suggestions. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to see a better version of Skippy on Bushrangers Run!
That’s it from us for today.
Happy hunting!
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Status Update
Hello hunters,
It’s that time of the week again and here’s our weekly status update with a summary of what we’ve been up to in this corner of the world.
Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!
Tomorrow we’re kicking off a special event dedicated to St. Patrick’s Day which is celebrated on March 17th. Although this day has its roots in Ireland, it crossed the borders long time ago and has become truly international. This year, for the first time, we’ve decided to pay a tribute to the day of shamrock, so there will be hunting, nice trophies and, who knows, maybe even some gold at the end of rainbow if you’re lucky. You will hear more on this tomorrow, but whether Irish or not Irish – come and have some fun hunting!
Player Survey – Have your say!
It’s been exactly one year since our last big survey, in this period of time our community has grown like mushrooms under the rain and we want to learn more about you and hear what you have to say to us. Today we’re launching a new survey, the results of which will guide us in our work on developing the game. As always, please try not to make assumptions that certain features, reserves or animals will be introduced just because they were somehow mentioned.
The survey will be open for 10 days, until March 23rd midnight CET. It shouldn’t take you longer than 15 minutes to answer all of the questions, but you can only participate once. We will appreciate your honest and detailed replies. If you answer to all the questions and fill in your theHunter name at the end, you’ll be automatically enrolled into our em$ draw, where we will randomly choose three players and gift them 1000 em$. You can also choose to submit your answers anonymously. Please note that even if you let us know your name, the information you provide will not be stored with your account details, shared, sold, distributed or used in any other way that may harm you.
Collectibles on Bushrangers Run
Some of you have already stumbled upon them – there are now three different types of Australian aboriginal knives from different time periods to be found and picked up in Bushrangers Run. They are not to be used for hunting – alas! – but finding one of them will for sure make your Australian hunting experience even more immersive (the Outback Outfit will help too).
That’s it from us for today.
Happy hunting!
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Game Update
Features
Bug fixes
- Fix for the jittering of weapons and other items – Thanks to a heroic joint effort by the Primal and theHunter teams we have finally been able to solve this age old bug that manifested in the player appearing to have shaky hands, it was especially visible when aiming down iron sights of weapons and when wielding bows.
- Fix for the bird feathers having an unintended black outline
- Fix for Silver tipped female fox being labeled as Melanistic in hunt statistics
- Terrain fixes
- Spawn map at Val-des-Bois updated to prevent other animals than Alpine Ibex from spawning in the mountains
- Fix for the forum signature widget (missing animals added)
- Fix for broken design of the friends list
Status Update
Hi there hunters,
Here comes a weekly status update from us.
- After the release of Bushrangers Run last week we’ve received a lot of feedback from you, mostly in terms of what animals inhabit it, but also other aspects, such as sound and art, thanks for that! We really appreciate how engaged and passionate you are about everything happening with theHunter and you can be sure that we’ll take all the feedback seriously and discuss the possibility to implement some of your suggestions. As usual, we can’t promise anything at this point, because we don’t want to raise any expectations. Just keep in mind that while a lot of suggestions might sound like great fun and that is the only factor that might seem to matter to you, like any other game development studio out there, we have a bunch of other factors to consider, for example scientific lining behind the game design, game engine functionality, development roadmap, resources and budget and other boring stuff which still dictates our everyday work.
- The weekend following the release of Bushrangers Run a lot of people experienced downtime on our web and game servers. To make up for your lost game time, we’ll be adding 1 extra day to all active memberships. We’ve also conducted an internal investigation and taken measures to prevent this from happening again in the future.
- We are now in the process of revamping our forums, in order to bring you a more slick and user-friendly community experience. Any suggestions on what functionality you’d like to have will be very much appreciated. You can share it in this thread and expect to hear more on this later.
- And the last tidbit about the EW team. You might remember the story of our client programmer Robin, which we shared a couple of months ago. He suffered a stroke back in August 2014 and at the time when that status update was written he was still in the hospital. In the last couple of months Robin has made some tremendous progress, he is back on his feet already, has visited the office a couple of times and said Hello and Thank you to all the people who were sending him their best wishes and asking about him. Robin still has a long recovery journey in front of him, but he is already chirpy, back to his sense of humour and playing theHunter (hopefully soon back to coding it too!).
- Another staff notice – we have a new team member, his name is Hannes and he has joined us as a producer. Check his intro below and say Hi:
Hello All,
My name is Hannes Rhodin and I have just jumped onboard the Expansive Worlds ship as a Producer. It is exciting times; full steam ahead on both theHunter and theHunter: Primal, and some very interesting ideas are in the making.
I’ll try to introduce myself, I live in Stockholm with my girlfriend (since 15 years back) and two kids… yes, I’m old. My hobbies are storytelling, movies, art, pulling weights and sculpture, with focus on sculpture right now. Here is a work-in-progress picture of my latest piece:
I have been in the computer game and digital graphic business for more or less 25 years, mainly focusing on the art, animation, level design, story and cinematic parts of it. Working in lead positions have got me in to the Producer craft. In my role as a producer at EW I will be focusing on theHunter and theHunter:Primal, great products with great possibilities and with a healthy connection to the community… to you, all the hunters and the hunted ;), this communication is something I value and think I can learn a lot from.
Cheers!
That’s it for today, see you around and happy hunting!
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Game Update
Changes
- Updated Lod steps on rocks and bushes,
- Updated Cliff models
- Tweaked texture colours and ambient colours,
- Fixed Kangaroo Tracks
- Fixed bad collision
- Tweaked forest materials for better performance
- Tweaked placement of rocks and grass
- Updated Lodge locations
- Added some new props
Bug fixes
- Another blood track fix
Game Update
Bug fixes
- Fixed the weather, now there is rain on all maps except Bushrangers Run
- Fixed the roads on Whitehart Isalnd so they do not look like dirt roads on Bushrangers Run
- Fix for Kangaroo sounds being heard from 280m away
- Fix for clue confirming not showing the correct info (blood clues)
Game Update
Features
- New Australian reserve: Bushrangers Run
- New animal species: Red Kangaroo
Changes
- Updated to a new FMOD sound system
- Updated localization
- Redesigned launch map
Bug fixes
- Fix for animal pathfinding around world items (tents, blind etc.), animals could walk through some of them
Status Update
Hi hunters,
A very short update from us regarding the upcoming reserve. We’ve considered 
all name ideas you suggested and after some internal debate we decided to call it Bushrangers Run. This was one of the anonymous suggestions we received by PM and the team really liked it. A Bushranger is an Australian outlaw/bandit, often held in high esteem and considered iconic to Australia, and a run is the path drovers take their cattle when migrating the herd. We thought it would be appropriate for the EHR.
To give you a sneak peek at Bushrangers Run, we are organizing a pre-release livestream. As previously with Val-des-Bois, the streamed hunts will take place on our beta server, it will still be WIP. The stream will be offered in English and German and will be organized completely by our community members Pratze, HooCairs, Killertut and our game design intern Pär.
Here is a cool announcement video by Pratze. You can find the dates and times of the livestreams below.
Times and dates of the pre-release livestreams:
English: Tuesday, 24th at 20:00 CET
Streamed by Pratze, joined by HooCairs and Pär
You can watch it on this channel
German: Tuesday, 24th at 22:00 CET
Streamed by Pratze, joined by HooCairs and Killertut
You can watch it on this channel
Hope you’ll be able to make it!
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Status Update
Hey all you happy campers,
In this status update we’re closing the Valentine’s event and giving you a sneak peek on the new species. Let’s go.
We really enjoyed following your heart$ fights in the Valentine’s event last week and it was a great success, especially the new “Share the love” feature. With people generously offering their heart$ to “those in need”, it’s become an amazing celebration of community spirit and one more time revealed what an awesome community we have at theHunter. It was very touching to watch the whole community put their hearts (both game points and real ones) together to raise the player Rcnitrodad to the top of the leaderboard. For those of you who don’t know this story, Rcnitrodad is a single dad taking care of his son James, who is 14 and who is fighting his second cancer battle. theHunter is one of the few things that can put a smile on the boy’s face these days and his dad plays it for him while James is watching and giving directions. We’re sending our best wishes to Rcnitrodad and his son. We hope you’ll get better soon James and can start bagging those trophy bucks by yourself! The thoughts of the whole theHunter community are with you, as the Valentine’s Event has shown so beautifully.
Here’s the Valentine’s event leaderboard for top 10 places, congratulations to all the winners:
Rcnitrodad – 17180 heart$
Pittie – 14485 heart$
M4G1E – 11675 heart$
windy2 – 9695 heart$
domdom92 – 8225 heart$
Manfred3175 – 8140 heart$
Musodacan – 5930 heart$
HooCairs – 5700 heart$
Taugor – 4840 heart$
XINTIMID88ORX – 4820 heart$
Apart from the top 10 winners, another 509 hunters received the plaster trophy and we also established a special prize for most generous hunters who have shared their heart$ with the largest amount of people. These three players received this unique “Most loving hunter” trophy:
RiffRaff24 – shared his heart$ with 18 different hunters
Mysen – shared heart$ with 15 different hunters
Swampfox – shared heart$ with 13 different hunters
Once again, thanks for the great community event everyone. Let’s do more of this.
And now to the new reserve news. We are still going through your suggestions trying to pick a suitable name for it (that’s a tough one), so we’ll let you know what we decide later on. There have been lots and lots of speculations, suggestions and general ramblings about the species present in the new reserve, so here you go: apart from your old acquaintances Feral Hog, Red Fox and European Rabbit we could not not put this cool guy in the Australian reserve –
the Red Kangaroo!
Here is a small sneak peek of the kangaroo’s model and animations from Simone and José, enjoy! The video and screenshot below are still work in progress and the things will be changed and tweaked.
Red kangaroos in theHunter, as in real life, will move extremely fast, so taking a shot will be extra challenging.
Happy hunting!
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