Today's News
Status Update
Wednesday, 1st September 2010
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!
The team is focusing on the last parts of the pheasant and clay-pigeon shooting implementation. The plan is to go into a test phase by the end of this week and then do a couple of iterations to refine and nail the implementation and design.
While testing the development on the new patch system mentioned the previous week continues with an overhaul of the installer and improvements of the launcher. The benefit of existing users is of course that patches will be smaller and much smoother to automatically apply, but biggest benefit is that for completely new users the sign-up and installation process will be much simplier and easier. In the end one pieces of the puzzle to attract more users to the game.
By the time this is done the pheasant and clay-pigeon shooting, together with the rest of the changes and additions, is hopefully in a state where we feel it's ready. Then all bits and pieces are put together to enter a final testing phase. All together the plan is to release the content update in the second half of October.
Although focus is on getting the update out, some members of the team has already begun working on new stuff. Some in the near future after the content release, some more long-term.
TrackIR
I'm happy to say that we are partnering up with NaturalPoint and will bring TrackIR support to theHunter.
TrackIR will be released in it's own update after the content release and we will run some interesting events to promote TrackIR.
As part of the TrackIR update we will also bring support for free look.
Random antlers
Another important feature that is in the pipeline is a true random antler system with scoring that really match what you see in the game. Antlers will be procedurally created to provide both variation and different sizes, making an animal's antler truly unique, as opposite to the model based antler system that exist today.
We do know that this is probably the number one requested feature, and an important one.
Actually, a part of this system is used to make the pheasant tail feather available in an unlimited number of lengths, with scoring exactly matching what is visible in the game.
Lion's Outdoor Blog
Lion just started a blog over at the Outdoor Channel where he shares some thoughts about PC hunting game development to a non-gaming audience. Of course we hope this will result in maybe a few people finding out about the game.
Till next time, happy hunting!
