Wednesday, 18th January 2012
Status Updates are weekly posts made in the community forum where the team share insights into the development of theHunter.
It's Wednesday and another Status Update!
Last week we introduced the recurve bow. This week we'll look into how we're working on enhancing the animal AI and the animals long term goals by introducing behaviors and needs that change over the day.
First some background. Animals are spawned at the start of a game and their AI is fast-forwarded to make them leave tracks before you as a player take your first step. Where the animals are spawned is controlled by spawn maps that are specific per species and controlls where species are allowed to spawn. So although random, animals are likely to start somewhere in these areas.
However, once spawned the animals have only short-term goals in terms of movement. Depending on time of day they are more likely to eat or sleep, but their "walking goals" are pretty much random (an animal get a location that it walk towards, once there it gets a new goal). If it is a group of animals the other animals rather follow the leader than get their own goals. Some species, like the pheasant, roam only in the high grass unless they need to flee. But once calmed down they head back to their preferred habitat.
In terms of using the ground blind and the tree stand, your best location today is to learn where animals are most likely to spawn and roam. But their movement is hard to predict.
What we're working on now for the February Game Update is to introduce some AI and logic into the animals long-term movement goals.
This is done by enhancing how animal movement change based on the basic need of eating, drinking water and bedding. Depending on time of day (it will be different from species to species) animals are more likely to move towards a habitat where they eat, find water or are sheltered to bed down.
The biggest change is that by learning how different species move during the day and towards what type of areas you are more likely to encounter an animal. Hence permanently mounting a tree stand or erecting a ground blind will make much more sense once you feel you've found a good spot where animals have a higher probability to pass by.
This feature will also reduce the probability of seeing animals bed down in the middle of a road or eat in maybe not the most appropriate terrain.
Most importantly, a new player or someone not knowledgeable about this can continue to hunt as they did before. However, if you start to learn more about the species and how they move during the day, you increase your chances of getting that trophy bull.
A little message to all our players from France. There is now a new French community website managed by well-known player Cireme called theHunterFrance.com. Make sure to visit it!
Un nouveau site dédié aux joueurs francophones vient d'ouvrir ses portes ! Vous y trouverez des informations sur les prochaines nouveautés, les derniers messages officiels traduits en français, et plus encore.
Till next week, happy hunting!
