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.
Most of the remaining work on multiplayer is now related to code and animation which gives us opportunity to start looking at near future items and animals. Now it´s important to remember that we will still have limited support from our programmers and animators for a few more months, and therefore we will focus on adding things that will work within our existing system framework. But we´re still quite sure they will be sweet and well worth the effort.
Among other things (which will be announced as we go along) we intend to start out by addressing a seemingly popular request that we think should make a nice little addition to theHunter. A Red fox. Mainly created for the Hemmeldal reserve, but we might add a smaller population of them at Hirschfelden as well. The reasons for choosing the Red fox, and not waterfowl among other hot candidates, is that we can use parts of already implemented systems for animation and AI to speed up the development process. Waterfowl and other animals come with several and more extensive technical requirements that we don´t yet have time to adress.
And here´s where we would like some help from you guys. We´ve seen it happen several times; as we release a new animal we instantly get a load of feedback on mainly visual aspects such as body proportions etc. And some of these things being more or less tricky to change once all the textures has been finalized, and because we´re pushing new features. This happened with the Brown bear and it has happened before that as well. Despite our best efforts as developers we are still under a lot of pressure which makes it easy to overlook smaller details. Then what specific reference material we are using also affect the outcome. For these reasons we would like to try having all of you contribute with your opinions on our work while it is still early in the process which will give us a higher chance of addressing basic things that we might otherwise overlook. Quite simply, tell us what you think is important for us to consider around the fox based on the WIP images below. We will then do as much as we can to address that feedback within our timeframe and technical limitations etc.
Red Fox work in progress
When the model is done we will proceed with creating textures and making sure everything works well with the animation set. Final things to address is AI behaviors and setting up, testing and tweaking populations and where these animals are spawned in the environments. There is no exact release date set yet, but expect this guy to show up within two months.
Server upgrades, Friday May 10th
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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