Wednesday, 11th August 2010
-/EFL/-DenPas (CL) (denpas)
@ 2010-08-12 11:38 AM PDT
Status Updates are weekly posts made in the community forum where the team share insights into the development of theHunter.
Welcome to this week's Status Update.
Patch is out
Finally the patch is out. The changes are based on community feedback and we wanted to get them out now rather than wait for the next content release.
We've lessen the effect of how coyotes affects other animals and done a couple of changes that might have led to frustration when using the calls (like an attracted animal suddenly going to sleep or that coyotes could under some circumstances leave another animal in a "frozen" state (that was a bug)).
One of the important additions was the introduction of having the Huntermate (which is the game's implementation of your senses, basically) tell you the gender of tracks when you have reached a tracking level of 5 or greater. This allow more experienced hunters to focus their tracking effort on bucks, if that's what they're after.
Server development
All suggestions and discussions in the forum is a great resource and really invaluable to us. We read every single post (even if we don't answer everything) and we get a lot of great ideas (like the leg band idea, just to mention one of the most recent).
Typically it is the client that receive most of the focus but a significant part of the game is also the server, and more specifically, the website.
There are a lot of enhancments we are planning, some really major, and we are aware of bugs like the dreaded memory limit error that unfortunately hits only our most dedicated players (we did manage to work around the issue for Hunt History, so at least that one should work now).
There is no easy fix for this since most of the problems are due to flaws on an architectural level. Being in systems we've inherited makes this extra tricky. The good thing is that we well underway solving this with a new game server implementation, that not only will perform significantly better than the current, but also make further development a lot more effective.
Pheasants
So far a lot of text, now time for some pheasants..
Welcome to this week's Status Update.
Patch is out
Finally the patch is out. The changes are based on community feedback and we wanted to get them out now rather than wait for the next content release.
We've lessen the effect of how coyotes affects other animals and done a couple of changes that might have led to frustration when using the calls (like an attracted animal suddenly going to sleep or that coyotes could under some circumstances leave another animal in a "frozen" state (that was a bug)).
One of the important additions was the introduction of having the Huntermate (which is the game's implementation of your senses, basically) tell you the gender of tracks when you have reached a tracking level of 5 or greater. This allow more experienced hunters to focus their tracking effort on bucks, if that's what they're after.
Server development
All suggestions and discussions in the forum is a great resource and really invaluable to us. We read every single post (even if we don't answer everything) and we get a lot of great ideas (like the leg band idea, just to mention one of the most recent).
Typically it is the client that receive most of the focus but a significant part of the game is also the server, and more specifically, the website.
There are a lot of enhancments we are planning, some really major, and we are aware of bugs like the dreaded memory limit error that unfortunately hits only our most dedicated players (we did manage to work around the issue for Hunt History, so at least that one should work now).
There is no easy fix for this since most of the problems are due to flaws on an architectural level. Being in systems we've inherited makes this extra tricky. The good thing is that we well underway solving this with a new game server implementation, that not only will perform significantly better than the current, but also make further development a lot more effective.
Pheasants
So far a lot of text, now time for some pheasants..
