The Hunter – Diary of a Hunter – Issues Addressed In Latest Patch

Earlier today we released patch that addresses a couple of issues we’ve discovered since the latest update.

Here’s the changelog:

• Animals will no longer flee into deep water (may still occur but should be rare)
• Animals will no not eat in water
• Fix for animals temporarily “freezing” when shot or spooked
• Animals are now smarter when reacting to calls, the may now navigate through more complex terrain and water
• Fix for some rare occurrences of photos taken in game not being uploaded
• In some rare circumstances animals could spawn at “less than optimal” locations, like in deep water or slopes, where they had a hard time finding a way out. This is now fixed.
• Bear & pheasant scores do now smoothly follow normal distribution, previously some score intervals did not appear. This will result in a wider range of scores (max/min limits are still same)
• Crashes occurred when quickly switching to inventory before all data and asset was loaded when retiring to a lodge or campsite. There is now a brief loading screen to ensure everything is really loaded.

As usual it will be automatically applied next time you start the game. There’s some things that didn’t made it to this patch, like the age-old infamous “frozen turkey” that we believe we’ve fixed (at least one occurrence of it).

We have a couple of things going now. With the client programming Andrés is focusing on the TruRACS (True Random Antler Configuration System, fancy eh?) for the moose together with Dick and we’ve made some nice progress during the past week. Emil is working on the server migrating more and more data from the old system, today all past competitions results went live. Expeditions are coming very soon.

Björn is doing a lot of stuff, among other things working on new competitions. He’s also involved together with Hanna and Peter with some interesting changes we will introduce in a while related to Guest players.

Coming changes for Guest players

Guests are important, because everyone starts out as Guest and the hopefully continues with a membership. And it’s the memberships that make it possible for us to do what we love – bringing you even more improvements and additions to make you the ultimate hunting game.

Making the guest experience as good as possible is crucial. We added tutorials to make the learning curve less steep, that helped a lot getting new players to grasp the concept of tracking, spotting, shooting and harvesting. What we will do now is to also make the first “real” game experience more suitable to beginners. We don’t want to dumb down the game, still we need to make it easy to begin with.

The major change we will do is to move the Mule Deer onto Logger’s Point, and Logger’s Point will thus become the new free Guest area. Because it is much more open than Whitehart Island it’s also easier to see and encounter animals, which is more suitable to new players. Additionally Logger’s Point is also a more natural habitat for the Mule Deer.

As a bonus we will also be revising the southern part of Whitehart Island that have been largely unused and the least popular starting point according to our statistics. All this together with some other things will be released in an update later this month (more details will be coming).

Lion

There has been some speculation lately about where Lion has been the past week, and due to some personal reasons we’ve waited make this announcement until now. Lion is no longer working at Expansive Worlds and is moving on to some really exciting stuff that he hopefully will be allowed to announce very soon.

Lion has been instrumental in building the community around theHunter and has been an important part in the day-to-day work by managing Customer Support, moderating the forum and a lot of other things. We would like to wish him the best of luck on his future endevours (which hopefully will be known soon).

Even with no Lion around, this doesn’t change our approach to working with the community and getting your input. Developers will still browse the forum and post and we still aim to be as transparent as possible regarding what we do. We do actually have some stuff coming up soon so you may put faces to our names and get to know us better…

Until next week… happy hunting!