Hello Hunters,

Here comes the update with the bits and pieces of what we’ve been up to at Expansive Worlds.

Russian avalanche

Last Thursday our registrations suddenly skyrocketed. The amount of new players went so high in such a short time, that our server couldn’t cope with the overload and we were forced to close down the registration for a couple of hours. Several ongoing games were also affected, our sincere apologies for that! We’ve detected the reason of the crash and made a fix, so it won’t happen again.

As we found out, this avalanche of new players mostly came from Russia and Russian speaking countries and was induced by the viral theHunter video made by two our players from Saint Petersburg.

No bad without good, we are happy to welcome all the new hunters – добро пожаловать!

Heads up from Herman

Speaking about server, we have started looking through the inventory code and some other parts of the in-game UI. Right now we are in the process of introducing big changes to the way we load the inventory, which will significantly cut load times. Hopefully, within a few weeks we’ll have a lightning fast inventory in place.

New shotgun and competitons

Today we stocked up the store with the brand new 12 GA Single Shot Shotgun, suitable for hunting all species, that are currently present in the game. You can buy it with gm$.

A new set of Mallard competitions got released on Monday. You can join via the Competitions page, if you haven’t done it yet.

Hit animal issue

Andrés has discovered another in-game issue that mostly affects players who hunt mallards.  A bit of technical background, to make it clear: Every animal in the game is assigned a ragdoll, which is a prerequisite for players to be able to hit an animal. Once you hit an animal, it reserves a ragdoll, which is freed when you confirm the killed animal with your huntermate or when you move farther than 220 meters away from the dead animal.

Right now there is a limit to the number of ragdolls of a type we can have active at the same time. Thus, if a player kills a lot of animals without confirming them, the game might run out of ragdolls, which basically means that the player will not be able to hit any more animals of that type again, until they confirm the animals that are dead.

That’s all for now, happy hunting!

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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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