Give it an hour to let your DNS changes replicate, or you can also try to manually flush your dns (http://www.tech-faq.com/how-to-flush-dns.html).

The short version is: wait an hour or two and you should be able to play again.

Sorry about the plethora of problems that has sprung up lately. :\

Those are the haps, pretty much – I dearly wish I had the time to work on adding new weapons and a friends list and such, but Real Life is a mean mistress. I hope you understand – I definitely do not intend on abandoning the game, but I have had to prioritize development away for more urgent matters lately. Sorry! :(

Keep them matches coming – almost 220,000 of them already – you guys are crazy!

Edit: Our dedicated server host messed up a motherboard exchange. Please bear with us until it is fixed. :\ Fixed.

The old master server is still running, though, but keep in mind that no statistics will be stored permanently when you play there. Read the new MOTD for more information.

The DNS change might take a day or two at worst to propagate for all of you, so if you’re still being sent to the old master server, just be patient!

If you experience any prolonged issues, don’t hesitate to ask for help in the forums.

EDIT: After migrating, the dedicated server is suffering from a failing harddrive. This is forcing the SH master server to be down. The matter is being looked into, and I hope to bring the master up again as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding. The server should now be back up, and hopefully this harddrive won’t fail on us. ;)

I apologize yet again for the lack of updates, too – over in ye olde real life, I’m about to enter crunch mode for a school project we’re doing, and after that I am moving to a new apartment. There simply hasn’t been a lot of time for me to work on Seal Hunter, and to reiterate, I am very sorry for that. I definitely intend to push out the new updated master server code to provide such things as buddy lists and a chat function, but at this rate, it might take me a while. Two hours per day worth of free time just isn’t quite enough, sadly.

I will keep you updated on the host switch as soon as I begin moving things over.

Ranking updates for all players are also temporarily disabled – this will be re-enabled with the release of the rewritten master server, which will take me some time to finish – but I hope that you guys will also prefer being able to play over getting disconnected every other game. Use the statistics website to look up the top 100, and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience caused by the recent server problems.

If anything weird starts happening as a result of this update, please let me now – it would primarily be related to things saying “unauthorized account” upon joining a game.

Have fun!

Update, 23:30: there seems to have been a network outage which now seems to be fixed. Everything should be working again.

Since that is the case, I will be rewriting the master server communication code entirely in favour of using persistent connections instead of connection on-demand. This might take a while – a week or two, at worst, with lovely 13 hour school days coming back up – but it’ll lay the foundation for several exciting new features that can be added in the future. (To name a few: friend notifications and messaging, possible NAT punchthrough, and dedicated servers!)

So all in all, while this might take a while, please bear with me. It’ll increase the overall stability of the master server as well as open up for future development.

And boy, more than one thousand registered players, with almost 24,000 matches played, in which four and a half million enemies have been killed? I’m thoroughly impressed!

Thing is, I’m not entirely certain what that will end up being, so I’m going to let you guys help me decide.

Dedicated Servers

Would be released as both a Windows and Linux binary, hopefully. This would help combat self-hosted games behind a router without forwarded ports. Could also allow for such things as scripted gamemodes later down the line. Would take a medium amount of time

Linux Client

Simple enough – a Linux build of the game client. I’ve attempted this earlier, but it was a wee bit too hard for me on the outset. As such, doing the dedicated server first might prove useful in giving experience. This wouldn’t require all too major changes to the codebase itself.

Mac Client

And for those of you who have been asking, I’d love to do a Mac client, but here’s the problem: I’ve no Mac to compile and test it on! Otherwise, the time investment should be about as much as for a Linux client.

Friends System

Having a friends list, possibly with a messaging system. Friends list itself isn’t that hard and would only take a moderate time to implement, but messaging system would require pretty much a complete rewrite of most of the client<->master communication code and drastically increase bandwidth requirements, which I’m not all too keen on.

NAT Punchthrough

Since you’re probably going “what?” – NAT punchthrough would attempt to open a connection to a server behind a router without the need for port forwarding. Would not work with all router configurations, however, but the definite majority. Again, possible complete rewrite of server<->master communication code.

New Weapons

Ak-74:s! The Burning Seal! Ruger 77! This could take anywhere from a moderate time to very long to implement depending on how complex the weapons are.

Post your opinions either as comments here or in the News section in the forums for more in-depth discussion!

The new release can be downloaded from the downloads page.

Introducing Seasons

This release introduces the concept of “Seasons” in regards to the highscore lists. Due to a few very much game-breaking bugs in v1.0, all current highscores have been archived as Season 1, and all highscores rankings are started anew. This is in order to keep the game fair for everybody regardless of which version they started out in, and also to keep the competitive aspect of the ladders fresh.

The end of a Season will hopefully be announced ahead of time in the future if it is mid-version, but all new versions that contain major changes to the way score is calculated or the gameplay itself will result in the start of a new Season.

General Changes

- Added classic TSH hud as an option
- Added option to use the player color for sniper lines
- Fixed turtles getting stuck in their shells after a player has left the game
- Scoreboard will now immediately disappear as soon as the scoreboard key is released
- Fixed shotgun shell being ejected too soon
- Switch weapon key now behaves the same way as in TSH; hitting it during cooldown will switch the weapon as soon as it is able to
- “First Blood” sound effect removed
- Chat and HUD text are now in bold for increased readability
- Ready countdown timer will now begin from 3 if the game being hosted is singleplayer
- Fixed enemies walking outside the map boundaries with 4 players
- List of servers now sorts itself by ping
- Fixed game being passworded indefinitely after restarting if passworded once
- Fixed loadout not saving when exiting menu with ESC
- Fixed a land mine exploit
- Fixed a bug causing certain aspects of the game score to stack between rounds
- Windows taskbar icon will now flash when a player joins the host’s game
- Fixed Punt Gun shell particle
- Number key weapon selection redone: 1-5 now correspond to the loadout weapon order, tilde (the key to the left of 1) will select the basic pistol

Gameplay Balance

- Rebalanced the Carl Gustav – it should now prove more viable in later levels (Price dropped from $9500 to $9000, splash decreased, overall damage increased)
- Fixed victim spawn rates during the level 4 boss not increasing properly (this makes level 4 harder)
- Made the level 2 boss spawn delay a bit longer
- Grenade minimum speed has been increased slightly
- Reload progress is now reset when switching weapon mid-reload
- Explosion radii penalty for 3 and 4 players has been reduced
- Increased the damage of the AWP and Shotgun against white seals
- Increased the damage of the Mac-10 against the level 4 boss
- Rebalanced the Land Mine (Old: $750, 750 damage, 1 mine/purchase, 3 second arm time, $15 combo bonus. New: $750, 220 damage, 3 mines/purchase, 2 second arm time, $20 combo bonus.)
- Fixed level 5 boss not devouring players in certain cases

Master Server

- Fixed server going unresponsive if a player leaves the game
- Fixed Big Spender achievement
- Fixed incorrect indication of players online

http://forums.sealhunter.se/index.php?topic=302.0

You also want to make sure that your firewall/anti-virus software isn’t blocking Seal Hunter’s traffic.

In other news, Seal Hunter 1.0.1 should be released sometime this week, with quite a bunch of fixes and tweaks to the gameplay balance!