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!

The only real issues that popped up were an immediate one, which was due to me being a total klutz and having forgotten to clear out a few tables, which caused the master server to disconnect any and every player after they had finished a game. There’s also currently an issue related to players leaving games, which will be fixed shortly, as well as a few minor client bugs (available loadout won’t refresh, unable to ready up) that might take a little while longer to fix until I can push a fixed version.

By popular request, I’ve added a list of achievements and ranks to stats.sealhunter.se. Have fun trying to get some of them – I can be rather mean, at times!

All in all, I’m absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of players (or rather, by the amount of time you guys have poured into this already) with more than 1,200 matches finished in less than a day, and I’m very happy to see that people seem to be enjoying the game!

‘Til next time, and happy hunting! (108,106 seals and counting.)

Seal Hunter v1.0 has been released!

I won’t keep you held up for too long: Go grab it now, and kill some seals!

If you like it, though, spread the word. Hell, if you’re feeling crazy, you can even donate to help keep hosting costs down if you like it enough. Be sure to check out the forums and your awesome statistics, too.

Enjoy, and make the fishing industry proud!

Anyway! The Release Candidate was just released privately. What does this mean? This means that the release is creeping very, very close. If you want a more precise indication, unless there’s any really horrible bugs that somehow pop up from absolutely nowhere, expect Seal Hunter to be released within the next week. I’m sorry I’ve been so bloody slow in developing this, but life in general has kept me awfully busy – and it is well known that all programmers are lazy.

So there you have it – expect some multiplayer seal hunting goodness to hit the ‘net in a week’s time or so. And on a final unrelated note, we totally won the Gamer’s Choice award with Eggnappers at SGA2010 as well! Thanks a lot to everybody who voted for us.

See you online very soon!

The last few months have been hectic for me, including a frantic two week crunch for our school game project (featuring the game’s scripting engine exploding a week before the final presentation), traveling woes, my  computer not doing what I tell it to, and Company of Heroes automatching. Yeah, I need a bit of fun on occasion, too. :(

Where does this leave Seal Hunter, though? As I’ve possibly mentioned earlier, the scoring system is truly the last little bit that goes into the game, and I’m still sorta waiting for a reply from the original developers on that particular detail (hi!). Not that receiving a reply would’ve mattered, anyway, as I’ve been insanely busy myself. :)

The statistics page is sorta-up, though (but not publicly accessible), and I’ve spent what little free time I’ve had to improve on that further. I really hope I’ll be able to properly release Seal Hunter this summer – it might not be in the most polished of states, but god damn it, you’ve waited long enough.

As I promised in the forums (you should totally go visit them), here’s the two game projects I’ve been working on across the last school year:

• Eggnappers – a party game for 2-4 players
• Dynasty of Zealots: A Legend’s Story – a singleplayer action-adventure game with ridiculously high system requirements

I’m greatly biased towards Eggnappers, myself, seeing as we had a lot more time to truly polish that one up. If you want to do me a great favour, go download Eggnappers and try it out with a friend or three. If you want to do me an even greater favour (and if you enjoyed the game, of course!), please click the Vote button beneath Gamer’s Choice, because winning the Gamer’s Choice award would be quite awesome indeed.

On that note, I’ll be attending the Swedish Game Awards Game Day Expo later on this week down in Stockholm. Come by our hope-to-be booth and say hi!