https://sealhunter.se/Latest news from Seal Hunteren-usSun, 20 Sep 2015 13:56:50 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2015/09/20/lobby-bugs-fixed/Sun, 20 Sep 2015 13:56:50 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2015/09/20/lobby-bugs-fixed/Time for the yearly update in which I tell you about embarrassing things! So, in short: The statistics website is down and has been down for ages. It will be coming back up, but I cannot give you an exact timeframe. A lobby server bug has been fixed that caused the game to go back to the main menu after earning an achievement. A lobby server bug has been fixed that caused certain matches not to be accepted if the player used a certain colour.https://sealhunter.se/2014/05/18/highscore-season-3/Sun, 18 May 2014 20:14:21 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2014/05/18/highscore-season-3/Hey there, hunters! After being on highscore season two for a very long time, we’ve now taken the step to season 3. You can now climb a fresh ladder anew! This also brings a new leveling experience – it will no longer take as long to rank up and unlock all weapons. The new experience curve looks like this: As you can see, it is way flatter to get you up to speed more quickly.https://sealhunter.se/2014/01/12/server-updates/Sun, 12 Jan 2014 17:02:55 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2014/01/12/server-updates/And thus, we return to your regularly scheduled blog posts, about three years after the last one. Yep, still alive! The Seal Hunter Stats site has been moved to a new host – it should be much snappier, and it has received a few facelifts in the process. You should totally check it out. At the same time, the master server has also been moved to a new host. This should speed things up and improve reliability in general for those in the Europe/Asia region.https://sealhunter.se/2010/11/04/dns-changes/Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:18:56 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/11/04/dns-changes/There have been connectivity issues for some of our services, so we’ve been given a new IP, and I did not know this beforehand (there are other admins for this specific dedicated server, too). 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/11/02/brief-update/Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:45:47 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/11/02/brief-update/The downtime the last 24 hours has been caused due to the fact that the Seal Hunter database is growing way bigger than I ever imagined it to (it is currently hovering around the 0.7 GB mark, and rising) and this has caused slowdowns in various systems. I will be tracking them down over the next few days to minimize server downtime and lag. Work on the new master server is progressing slowly, mainly because… …I’ve moved (and am currently more stressed out than I had ever fathomed one could be), and I’ll be starting my internship with an actual game developer company tomorrow, leaving me even less free time to work on my game.https://sealhunter.se/2010/10/14/master-server-migration-complete/Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:49:39 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/10/14/master-server-migration-complete/The Seal Hunter master server has now moved to its new server (for the more technically inclined, IP 217.23.15.182), and while there are a few initial roadbumps (stats.sealhunter.se will be down for a little while), things should now perform quite a bit better. 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/10/12/master-server-migration/Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:18:12 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/10/12/master-server-migration/The SH master will move over to a new and much more powerful host in the next few days, and as such the DNS will be updated to point to a new IP. This might cause some downtime for all of you as the master server needs to be temporarily taken down in order to replicate all the databases, and some additional downtime as DNS changes might take a while to propagate all around.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/29/master-server-updates/Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:06:52 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/29/master-server-updates/The Master Server has been updated for performance reasons – you should hopefully experience “Unable to contact master server” related errors a lot less as a result. I was doing some very, very bad things in the piece of code that ran every time the game client looked up its stats. (Horribly bad. I won’t mention the specifics to any other living being: it was just that embarrassing.) 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/16/unexpected-server-downtime/Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:11:43 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/16/unexpected-server-downtime/The physical machine that the SH master server is running on is for the moment being unavailable for unknown reasons. Sorry about this – I will try to keep you updated. Update, 23:30: there seems to have been a network outage which now seems to be fixed. Everything should be working again.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/13/rewriting-the-master-server/Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:56:17 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/13/rewriting-the-master-server/As some of you might have noticed, the SH master server hasn’t been quite as snappy as one would like it to be lately. The reason for this is actually a rather pleasant one – during peak times, there’s a ridiculous amount of connections done per second to it! The downside is, of course, that my network library seems to choke on handling all the connection requests at once. This is bad – and it is also the likely cause of all those “master server unresponsive” messages some of you have been experiencing.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/08/priorities/Sun, 08 Aug 2010 19:34:45 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/08/priorities/After releasing 1.0.1, and with 1.0.2 probably a week or two away still, I’m already making plans for the first ‘big’ update to SH. 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/05/seal-hunter-1-0-1-released/Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:47:20 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/05/seal-hunter-1-0-1-released/This is mainly a bugfix and balance release after some of the more horrible bugs discovered in 1.0. :) 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/03/a-notice-for-those-with-problems-hosting/Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:02:31 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/08/03/a-notice-for-those-with-problems-hosting/As a quick little heads-up, those of you having problems hosting games, please read this topic: 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!https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/31/release-post-mortem/Sat, 31 Jul 2010 12:05:31 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/31/release-post-mortem/Everything went better than expected, one might say. 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/30/seal-hunter-1-0-released/Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:00:16 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/30/seal-hunter-1-0-released/It’s been a long and awfully bumpy ride, with procrastination shining through the whole time, but it will hopefully all have been worth it. 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/22/almost-there/Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:34:36 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/07/22/almost-there/Okay, so. I suck at updating this here thing, I think that has been made perfectly clear over the course of this time. 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/06/07/summer-update/Mon, 07 Jun 2010 11:46:05 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/06/07/summer-update/So. In case any of you were wondering on how to neglect a blog in the best way possible, this is how you do it! 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.https://sealhunter.se/2010/03/06/multitasking/Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:23:38 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/03/06/multitasking/Another blog update that ended up being written all too late. Anybody surprised? Didn’t think so. :) For all Russian players, I’d like to tell you about a new Russian fansite that has been finished up fairly recently – sealhunter.ru! If you’re one of those bear fighters from the east, you might wanna give it a gander. While progress has been slow, I’ve spent most of what little free time I’ve had lately trying to iron out the last few not minor bugs left in the Beta, as well as streamlining most of the interface and menus.https://sealhunter.se/2010/01/31/tales-from-the-beta/Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:05:23 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2010/01/31/tales-from-the-beta/Sorry for being so darned quiet! I’ll try to better myself. Promise. Flog me into action, should that be broken. Anyway – the Seal Hunter beta is progressing quite nicely at this point – so far there’s been a total of 12 major beta revisions released. A whole load of bugs has been ironed out, many features have been polished, and quite a bit of balance/stability testing has been done. Currently, what I’m trying to focus on is the balancing of three player games – it’s way harder than what is reasonable (I wouldn’t be surprised if the difficulty of this will force me to limit the game to a total of three participating players – technical issues contribute, too).https://sealhunter.se/2009/12/20/gameplay-preview-video/Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:35:34 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/12/20/gameplay-preview-video/Here’s a little treat for you non-beta people. Sorry about my accent and sounding so bloody nervous!https://sealhunter.se/2009/12/06/forum-upgraded/Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:55:28 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/12/06/forum-upgraded/After a brief downtime, the forums has now been upgraded and equipped with a fancy schmancy new theme. Nothing else to report to the public at the moment, I’m afraid – school projects are still keeping me exceptionally busy, leaving me with only the weekend for any kind of coding work. Again, I’ll try to push some new previews out to non-beta peeps in a little while. Sorry about being so silent!https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/29/second-testers-batch-accepted/Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:53:54 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/29/second-testers-batch-accepted/If you’ve applied to be a beta tester, no matter how recently or how long ago, go check your e-mail (remember the spam folder!) – or even better, visit the forums and see if you have access to a shiny new section. Should you not have been accepted this time either, please accept my humblest apologies. I can’t accept all testers, since they’re almost all too many already! And beta wise, things are progressing nicely, but y’know, that school thing.https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/23/second-batch-of-beta-testers/Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:55:12 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/23/second-batch-of-beta-testers/Sorry for being so quiet – bugs are indeed coming at me like in Starship Troopers, see, and a school project is also keeping me all too busy! Anyway, in the next few days (read: in the next week or so) I will most likely bring in a second batch of beta testers – so keep your eyes and ears peeled for an e-mail (alternatively, just visit the forums and see if a brand new section is available to you).https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/07/beta-begins/Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:43:25 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/11/07/beta-begins/First of all – a big thank you to all people who applied for the beta. Whew, there was a hundred of you – far exceeding my expectations! The beta phase has now started, with a little over 40 testers being appointed for the time being. “Bugs coming at us like in Starship Troopers”, to quote a certain song. With this in mind, I’d like to apologize to those people not brought in for the beta – I know it must be a real downer for you guys.https://sealhunter.se/2009/10/31/beta-signups-now-open/Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:37:02 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/10/31/beta-signups-now-open/I’ve now reached the point where testing on a larger scale is about to become necessary, and while the game isn’t quite beta ready just yet, I’m mere inches away. Thus – let’s get this going. In order to sign up, visit http://beta.sealhunter.se/ and fill in your application. Note that you will need a forum account – which you hopefully already should have. More information and a deadline beyond which I won’t consider applications any longer will follow in due time.https://sealhunter.se/2009/10/15/walrusd/Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:40:15 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/10/15/walrusd/Good news, everyone – the walrus is now pretty much all done! What is the walrus capable of, you might ask? Encouraging me to rewrite large portions of the game. Devouring me alive (Either he’s way too hard right now, or I’m simply a sucky player). Forcing me to implement proper interpolation. Moonwalking. With all that in mind, there’s still a few kinks left to work out. For example, you can’t finish the game yet.https://sealhunter.se/2009/09/13/bandwagon/Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:26:28 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/09/13/bandwagon/Yeah, I couldn’t resist. There’s now a Twitter feed for Seal Hunter over in the sidebar, which I will hopefully utilize to bring you more frequent – and also more brief – updates. At least being forced to stay beneath a certain message length will aid that sentiment. On a different note, I’ve just finished a very painful albeit necessary switch to a new font rendering library (Glyph Keeper, for those inclined).https://sealhunter.se/2009/09/07/todo-list/Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:45:20 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/09/07/todo-list/Yeah, I know, I’ve been lazy come updating lately. Anyway! What has happened since last time? I’ve finished the game intro cinematic. Yes, there’s a whopping 60 second long intro cinematic, and it’s fairly awesome. I’ve rewritten the music player. I ran into some issues with AllegroOGG, so I’ve now switched over to irrKlang for music playback. I’ve attempted updating my network library to the latest version twice, and horribly failed in doing so because of some teething issues with a major new update to RakNet.https://sealhunter.se/2009/08/04/another-quick-update/Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:47:45 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/08/04/another-quick-update/… Yeah, I’m too lazy to come up with a proper post title this time, too. There’s actually been some progress since last time, but sadly nothing that’s actually really easy to, uh, take a screenshot of and show off to the public. Most importantly, matches are now submitted to the master server and inserted into the main statistics database. That alone is a huge feature, now (almost!) all finished up.https://sealhunter.se/2009/07/09/quick-update/Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:58:32 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/07/09/quick-update/I’ve been slacking off quite badly as of late – at least compared to the amount of work I got done before the summer vacation – but what the hell, you can’t blame a man for wanting to play games rather than make ’em. That being said, I have with the help of a fella named Cory managed to finish up the last of the sprite/strip related work which I swear to God is the most boring thing about this entire project.https://sealhunter.se/2009/06/25/dont-panic/Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:55:07 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/06/25/dont-panic/Seeing as I only just now received a comment urging me to post more updates, I suppose it’s only fair to officially dub myself a lazy bastard and try to alleviate this by giving you a new post straight away! So it’s with pride that I today announce what I’ve been working on for the last month or so: Seal Hunter MMO Edition! (Since some people don’t seem to notice – this is a joke.https://sealhunter.se/2009/05/29/statistical-laziness/Fri, 29 May 2009 17:57:51 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/05/29/statistical-laziness/Not much has been going on lately – high school finals and graduation and whatnot has stolen most of my time away and after about two years worth on working on this codebase I reached the point earlier this month when I felt way to fed up with it working with it. Not to worry though, I still fully intend to try and get a beta going during this summer, but it’s sadly looking more and more unlikely that it’ll be out before July as time goes on.https://sealhunter.se/2009/05/11/gearing-up/Mon, 11 May 2009 19:28:59 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/05/11/gearing-up/Most work done on Seal Hunter lately has merely been about polishing the overall first impression of the game and making things a bit more logical. With a prototype version having been sent off to PlaygroundSquad as my work sample (and after doing some serious code crunching) I’m rather relieved and miscellaneous UI elements is all I’ve been working on lately. As well as this bastard of a menu which was an utter pain to code.https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/28/raincheck/Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:00:48 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/28/raincheck/There hasn’t been anything exciting enough done lately to warrant a blog post, but I suppose showing some sort of life signs is a good thing. For a bit more personal stuff, my high school graduation is drawing closer, which means an excessive amount of school work – which includes a project report with full documentation on Seal Hunter. Yay! Boring as all hell. Apart from being my graduation project, Seal Hunter is also going to be my work sample submission for a fancy Swedish games programming school; this means that the any progress made lately has gone into the possibility for the game to actually end – in other words, with the player losing.https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/18/area-denial/Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:46:11 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/18/area-denial/Despite not being entirely finished up, I’d like to present two of the new weapons that are planned for Seal Hunter. Again, please do note that Seal Hunter is not finished by far and everything is still very prototype-y. What I’ll be showcasing in this post might be changed or removed entirely in the future, so please be considerate. ;-) Anyhow, I’ll try to keep this short’n’sweet! Above, you can see the frag mines in action and this particular flavour being the proximity mine which explodes whenever a creature comes in contact with it.https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/15/forums-are-now-live/Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:30:07 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/15/forums-are-now-live/For those who wish to partake in slightly more accessible discussions than those held in this blog’s comment section, the Seal Hunter Forums are now open. I encourage you to register there and kick things off! (This especially goes for those who aspire to become beta testers. Proving yourself active is good!) Join us today!https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/10/have-a-plan-to-kill-everything-you-meet/Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:56:27 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/04/10/have-a-plan-to-kill-everything-you-meet/It’s been a while, so here’s a quick update on what little is being done (emphasis on little). Right now there’s quite a bit of lobby <-> game communication that needs to be written, and I find this extremely boring. To put this in an easier fashion, I’m making the game servers record and submit game results to the account server – and progress with this is very slow. On a positive note though, clients that are connecting to a game sends their account identity which is then checked against the account server by the game host.https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/30/accounts-statistics-and-experience/Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:17:34 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/30/accounts-statistics-and-experience/One of the biggest new features that I haven’t mentioned in plain text earlier is the addition of online accounts. This is something I am very excited about myself, as it will allow for some rather advanced statistics tracking, which in the end can in some ways help game balancing issues later on. The account system itself is fairly simple – all you need is a username, a password, and an e-mail address – and you’re ready to go.https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/18/i-hate-menus/Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:31:09 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/18/i-hate-menus/Or to be a bit more specific, menu coding. The most agonizing part about working on Seal Hunter so far has been to get a decent menu system going, to the extent that I’ve actually been forced to (re)write the code for them a total of three times. The first time around, I decided to simply go for Allegro’s built-in GUI system. As a feature of the graphics library itself, these were rather easy to implement and “everything just worked”.https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/06/fun-to-the-z/Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:29:49 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/03/06/fun-to-the-z/Whilst Seal Hunter thankfully is a 2D game, there’s still a Z property of certain game objects in order to give the illusion of depth in the scene, and since it’s pretty darn useful to have when it comes to particle effects. This was in itself entirely trivial to implement in 2D back in the day (just offset the y coordinate by the distance the object is above the ground etc etc) – but the difficulty of adding it to the game isn’t what this is about, it’s moreso a proof of how extremely messed up I am.https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/25/making-multiplayer-work/Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:38:46 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/25/making-multiplayer-work/At first, implementing a multiplayer system beyond the network code itself seemed a rather trivial task – I had been given a game concept already proved to work quite well. But the further this project progressed, the more complex did the actual implementation of multiplayer turn out to be, and I’d like to mention a few of the difficulties that I faced (and still am facing) related to this. Excessive co-operationhttps://sealhunter.se/2009/02/19/the-first-prototype/Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:05:46 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/19/the-first-prototype/Thanks to a prolonged exposure of The Seal Hunter and a three month Internet outage, I finally got bored enough to actually open up Dev-C++ (a (very bad) C++ IDE, for those who don’t know already) to see if I actually would manage to make anything more graphical than a console application that asked the user for their age. As it were, the only library I had available to me was one called Allegro – so I made the only logical decision to create a simple pong clone.https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/16/in-the-beginning/Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:17:53 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/16/in-the-beginning/I figured giving a quick account of how this project came to be would be in order. It all started one rather snowy day in the year of 2007. After having just finished a four hour web design class, a senior student walked into the room to showcase his latest findings in the field of gaming excellence: a rather compact game named The Seal Hunter, where the player entered the thick threads of a Norwegian fisherman seeking revenge on the seal creatures stealing his catch.https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/14/we-are-live/Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:03:54 +0100https://sealhunter.se/2009/02/14/we-are-live/Kind of, at least. Welcome to the development and news blog for a game currently in development, and also currently titled “Seal Hunter”. Don’t fret, however; it’s not a complete rip of The Seal Hunter, but instead a remake of the original concept with a number of changes and new features to it. Currently, Seal Hunter has been under development since February 2008 and has come a fair way since the start, and has moved from being a simple hobby of mine to becoming my final project for high school.