Diary of a Hunter – Opening
The Hunter is a free-to-play (f2p) online hunting simulator that is more than just a game. It’s the most realistic hunting game to date with mind-blowing graphics and sound. With a strong user base of 500,000 players, The Hunter should be your first choice in hunting games.
Diary of a Hunter is one hunter’s experience in the wild. It will be an on-going diary that will have weekly/monthly updates with personal in-game journal entries, patch notes, updates, and other material dedicated to TheHunter.com.
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| Welcome to today’s Status Update!
Prior to last week’s Status Update we were very busy preparing what actually was the biggest update to theHunter ever. It was released last Wednesday featuring a massive new environment, Redfeather Falls, the Black Bear and also quite some behind the scenes improvements. We did add a pathfinding system and we also changed to our new game server implementation. The game server is a pretty big thing, it’s something we’ve been working on since August last year (while still developing features, doing performance improvements and general operation of the old system of course). The new pathfinding system is also an important aspect, which allow us a lot more flexibility in designing environments since now animals will be a lot “smarter” how they move, avoiding getting stuck in fences or being trapped between water. The Update Overall, I believe this was actually on of our smoothest updates ever, definitely considering how much was actually changed in the client and the introduction of a completely new game server (and many under the hood changes of the website to retrieve it’s data from the new game server). Still, despite all testing there’s always some bugs that slips through, it may be on certain hardware configurations or special cases on the server. Since the update last week we’ve monitored both data and statistics from gameplay as well as reports here on the forum and focused on fixing and tweaking stuff. For the client we’ve been working on improving the pathfinding further, especially in the situation when an animal spooks which should reduce the probability of animals appearing to “freeze”. Another issue have been that some animals have been a little too daring when crossing water. We’ve also looked more closely to see patterns of where animals are roaming and being hunted on Redfeather Falls, and we will do a couple of small tweaks to balance the population over the map. This, and some more, will all be available in a small patch planned for next week. On the server there’s been a couple of issues with triggering certain conditions related to missions, some presentation issues, the turkey scoring was slightly off, shotgun shots appeared somewhat off in the statistics and a couple of other things. These issues have been fixed (and scores/stats recalculated where needed) as we found them. Performance and stability has been exceptional, which is important. The focus have been on fixing any issues appearing before we take the next step and also transfer all old data and statistics… Old Statistics and Expeditions Before starting the migration of all old statistics, expeditions and gallery images we wanted to make sure everything is running stable on the server. We will do some data migration by the end of this week and start the complete process of migrating data next Monday. Since this involves a lot of data and at the same time we don’t want to stress the servers too much the complete migration will take place during a period of 1-2 weeks. We will start migrating the most recent data and then go further and further back in time. What’s next? Other earlier announced stuff we have in the pipeline is of course the moose which also use the random antler system, TruRACS, and also coming up is the crossbow. We’ve also got a some other “refreshing” updates coming up. Our overall focus will with this release (and after the moose) change slightly from adding more content to instead building more value and depth around what we already have. Another thing we’ve started working on is introducing localization support, that is having the game in other languages than English – later this coming summer we will add an option to have the game and website in German. The Team We are doing some restructuring in the team and we are very happy to welcome a familiar face to “the other side” – NAOutdoors. David, based in Pennsylvania, USA, will be helping us out part-time with the customer support. In addition David is a very experienced hunter with vast knowledge of the US hunting industry. David is also involved in [url=http://www.huntofalifetime.org/]Hunt of Lifetime[/url], a nonprofit organization with a mission to grant hunting & fishing dreams for children age 21 and under, who have been diagnosed with life threatening illnesses. Until next week… happy hunting! |
