Poached : Hunt The Hunter News

I'm proud to announce this small update, the first for 2025! Amongst a few crucial fixes, I have been working hard on NPC animation and interaction to bring the game world more to life. I've done a few experiments before, and now with this update we are bringing a character to life.

'General Van Jaarsveld' who is heard providing mission briefings throughout the game, particularly in the early/first missions has now been brought to life as a living breathing NPC standing in front of you.
Featuring procedural blinking, synchronized facial expressions, inverse kinematics/looking and dialogue hand gestures coupled with movement and A.I.

He will react to you differently depending on how you behave, and features a comprehensive voice acting performance by the Voice Actor recorded at Asylum Studios over these holidays, which I am very excited to share with you!

This appearance comes with a brand new obstacle course led by Jaarsveld himself, which you can now access by selecting the "Tutorial" option from the main menu. The original tutorial is still available, but the first part now consists of the obstacle course. Any of the 3 tutorial segments can be exited at any time.

[h2]Main Features:[/h2]

• A new character brought to life as well as new voice acting.
  
• A new obstacle course level.
  
• New NPC hand gesture dialogue system.
  
• Enhanced NPC facial expression to dialogue syncing.
  
• New dialogue skip mechanic with VCR animation. Activated by holding spacebar for a few seconds while an NPC is talking.
  
• NPC spoken dialogue will change and react to your actions in the obstacle course based on weather you choose to take things seriously or not.
  
• New NPC's added to "Noise Complaint" secret mission, as well as new improved dance moves.
  
• New wind SFX.
  
• Fixed bug causing arrow buttons on controller to select weapons while using the inventory.
  
• When receiving radio transmissions, the player will now only automatically select the radio if there is no danger as well as being able to interrupt the radio switch by selecting a weapon.
  
• New "Scope Strength" slider in options which can be used for increasing or decreasing the zoom scope lens lines.
  
• Weapon wheel can now be assigned to a custom binding in control options.
  

A massive thanks to the users who have reported bugs to me on Discord as well as on our public Steam Forum. It's a great help and I please encourage people to let me know of any other issues they might find. Or even just to let me know what you did like, I am always down for a chat!

I hope you enjoy this first update of the year, it will be the first of many!

A small update to kick off the festive season, focusing on environment and wildlife with other regular maintenance updates.

[h2]Main Features:[/h2]

• 5 New animals.
  
• 7 New locations.
  
• Population of animals increased.
  
• Detail of outskirt environments has increased.
  
• New seamless sunset transitions.
  
• Various game performance optimizations.
  
• Various bug fixes.
  
• Various other improvements, listed below.
  
• Environment improvements and detailing.
  
• Improved vegetation and terrain texture painting.
  
• General visual enhancements.
  
• Many new models and items.
  

[h2]New Wildlife:[/h2]

• Buffalo: Are mostly docile but are known to kill humans. Comes in two varieties, clean and dirty - the dirtier the buffalo the more flies it will attract.
  
• Warthogs: Unendangered, relatively harmless, numerous.
  
• African Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus): Not known to attack humans, but a fearless predator amongst its peers.
  
• Scorpions: Good thing you're wearing those boots!
  
• Geese: Known to chase people up trees.
  

[h2]New Locations:[/h2]

• Reserve Entrance: The reserve now has its own actual entrance gate which visitors and guests would use to enter.
  
• Groundskeepers Cabin: The groundskeeper now has her own cabin and garden, this area will be further expanded on in other updates.
  
• Chicken Truck: Is now available at anytime in the game for the achievement mission, as opposed to only in chapter 2.
  
• 4 x Warthog Zones: containing additional detail.
  
• 5 x Buffalo Zones: containing additional detail.
  
• Forest Zones: shadowy biomes.
  
• Other new hidden areas and secrets.

[h2]Fixes:[/h2]

• Fixed issue with enemies firing before they finished reloading
  
• Numerous small other bug fixes and improvements.
  
• Reduced terrain flickering.
  
• Fixed some broken terrain seams.
  
• Fixed some areas you could get stuck.
  
• Fixed some skinned mesh renderers/animals/characters disappearing when halfway off the edge of the screen.
  

[h2]Improvements/Additions:[/h2]

• Increased likelihood of certain enemy bark audio.
  
• Removed trees that were placed on slopes unrealistically.
  
• New vegetation such as mushrooms and tomato plants.
  
• Improved Gazelle Texture.
  
• Improved warehouse exterior model material and texture.
  
• Improved other small building[s] material lighting.
  
• Improved intensity of "Sun Shafts" effect appearance, but can also be disabled from advanced graphics menu if not desired.
  
• Sunset transitions are now seamless when playing on high environment settings.
  
• Improved color quality and synchronization of distance fog at the base of mountains.
  
• Decreased the monotony of certain tree clusters outside of the main reserve.
  
• Improved the blending quality of certain asynchronous streaming zones.
  
• Improved quality of transition from terrain to distant mountain objects.
  
• Improved quality of waterfall rendering during night time.
  

[h2]Optimizations:[/h2]

• Implemented animation hashing for enemy reload action.
  
• Limited the amount of "miss" bullet decals that enemies can produce globally.
  
• Improved culling of bird flocks when not in camp.
  
• Improved culling of enemies when player is exploring outskirts far away from enemies.
  
• Removed more trees hidden under rocks.
  
• Improved cleanup of animals that have become invisible.
  
• Improved culling of animals and meshes inside the main camp while the player is out exploring.
  
• Removed trees growing under rocks that weren't visible using precious resources for nothing.
  
• Numerous other internal performance optimizations.
  
• 'Environment Quality' setting now affects the ambient lighting interval for time of day transitions.
  

[h3]This update now brings the total count of species in the reserve to 34.
The list of all creatures is below:[/h3]

Mammals:

• Rhino
  
• Zebra
  
• Elephant
  
• Giraffe
  
• Wildebeest
  
• Buffalo
  
• Warthog
  
• Wild Dog
  
• Gazelle
  
• Hippo
  
• Ostrich
  
• Goat
  
• Rat
  

Insects:

• Dragonfly
  
• Dung Beetle
  
• Rhino Beetle
  
• Common Fly
  
• Hornet
  
• Scorpion
  
• Snail
  

Amphibians/Reptiles

• Crocodile
  
• Salamander
  
• Frog
  
• Snake
  

Birds:

• Pigeon (bos duiwe)
  
• Crow (Swartkraai)
  
• Owl
  
• Sparrow
  
• Chicken
  
• Duck
  
• Goose
  

More species & locations to be added soon!

As always, thank you everybody for the continued support, encouragement & bug testing. It is greatly appreciated!

Happy Hunting and Happy Holidays.

While this update is relatively small in terms of content, it introduces a new system that paves the way for endless new content that is varied, exciting and provides a great new platform for the voice actors to express themselves as well as bringing life to the existing characters in the game.

Kicking off the new system is a short introduction scene that replaces the old cinematic introduction which featured a few fly-over shots with a voice over. You now get to meet in person the generals who are commanding you via the radio through the game, and one of them will communicate to you face to face. In future updates, you are going to be seeing a lot more of these NPC's and being able to interact with them directly and I firmly believe this is a necessary step for modern gaming to bring the world alive with living breathing characters.

The existing radio mission briefings will not be changed, only new content will be added featuring lip synced character NPC's, and will pave the way for hours of new content upcoming in 2025 and beyond.

Below are the main features, as well as other bug fixes, additions and optimizations as per usual.

Main Features:

• New introduction scene.
  
• 2 New character models.
  
• New character creation pipeline system.
  
• Endless potential character faces.
  
• New lip syncing system.
  
• Over 50+ possible Facial expressions.
  
• Procedural blinking.
  
• More voice acting.
  

Fixes:

• Fixed a recurring issue that would cause your ostrich race course progress to be reset if you played an earlier race again.
  
• Fixed issue making it possible to shoot NPC's while scoped.
  
• Fixed missing NPC colliders in ostrich racing.
  
• Fixed some boss fight related issues that I won't list directly due to spoilers.
  
• Fixed issue with B.I.R.D. scout being able to fly off and under the terrain bounds.
  
• Fixed some issues with weapon wheel responsiveness when using a mouse.
  
• Fixed numerical keys not working on Caravan PC main menu.
  
• Fixed missing colliders near Mission 5 drone control station.
  
• Fixed some issues with drone control station not triggering the next mission state correctly.
  
• Numerous other small bug fixes.
  

Additions:

• A few environment vegetation improvements.
  
• A new 'Potjiekos' model. (Traditional South African 3 legged cauldron).
  
• New "MelkTert" model. (A type of delicious milk tart pie).
  
• New coolerbox model. (Gotta keep those beers cool).
  
• Added better fencing for informal settlement area.
  
• Improved terrain seams and various terrain texturing near borders of tiles
  

Optimizations:

• All player triggers used for asynchronous loading now exist in their own layer so that they are never triggered by other non-player entities, even though only the player can activate them now the trigger is never called unnecessarily.
  
• Added all remaining elephants and giraffes into the asynchronous loading system for improved memory usage, as these animals never venture into the main reserve area by themselves.
  
• Deep analyzed texture compression and found (and fixed) a 21mb normal map used for the vehicle cabin down to 5MB without any loss in visual quality.
  
• Optimized specular maps used for outside shebeen walls.
  
• Converted some read-only static variables to constants for better memory efficiency.
  
• NPC Gardener character in ostrich racing now uses a single instance repositioned per race instead of multiple instances pre-configured.
  
• Implemented dynamic texture loading from disk for less common weapons that don't need their textures permanently stored in runtime memory.
  

Thank you everybody for playing! The next update V0.8.7.8 is going to focus on environment and wildlife, while I work towards a general large content update by V0.8.8. This is the beginning of an exciting new chapter, and I can't wait to share it with you all!

Keep those bug reports coming, and just general chats. You can always find me in the Discord or on the Steam forums, I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

- Twelv [Ingozi Games]

Optimizations:

• Environment quality settings now affect the quality of skydome sphere polygon density.
  
• Optimized bone hierarchy for skinned meshes with skeletons that don't require parented objects in the hierarchy, such as birds and insects.
  
• Optimized polygon geometry for small insects such as dung beetles that don't require high detail due to their size.
  
• Optimized animator controllers for some birds, rodents, insects and other larger animals as they included numerous animations and blend trees not being used.
  
• Removed unused trigger volumes from pigeons, sparrows, owls etc. that don't react to the player such as when eating bugs or observing the player.
  
• Converted secret "Skip Level" snails from skinned meshes to static meshes, since they aren't animated thus no reason for extra skinning processing.
  
• Converted dragonfly animation system from old legacy system to new Mecanim system as well as optimized internal skeleton and hierarchy.
  
• Optimized texture memory of incredibly small entities such as flies, wasps & dragonflies which barely take up a few pixels even when zoomed in.
  
• Optimized geometry of Gardener planting flowers found in grow room Mission 1
  
• Optimized memory of shopkeeper animation controller
  
• Small optimizations to sky dome algorithm.
  
• Optimized shop keeper look IK algorithm.
  
• Programmatically removed all unused tags from project.
  
• Optimized internal hierarchy and memory footprint of enemy muzzle flashes
  
• Optimized a redundancy inside enemy controllers related to idle animations also used in non-idling characters.
  
• Numerous code refactors, tweaks & micro-optimizations for improved performance on lower end devices.
  
• Environment detail now affects the distance of tree billboarding for better performance especially when viewing large vistas from a distance such as on top of a cliff.
  
• Optimized handheld radio texture memory usage.
  
• Enemy footstep algorithm now calculated velocity of enemy with square magnitude instead of magnitude velocity.
  
• Enemy footsteps are now pulled from a pre-shuffled array instead of a randomized calculation.
  
• Optimized the sharing of various data attributes between multiple instances of duplicate classes with improved implementation of static variables, constants and scriptableObjects.
  
• Optimized use of magnitude calculations in all scripting and navigation entities in favor of a squared magnitude calculation.
  
• Optimized raindrops internal algorithm and codebase.
  
• Optimized car damage collision dealer algorithm.
  
• Optimized terrain shadow casting vertex count.
  
• Optimized horizon fog synchronization calculation algorithm.
  

Additions/Details/Changes:

• New arm accessory for Character #4 making each character arm set truly unique.
  
• Running Audio [Coins/Bullets jingling in pockets] now softer and more subtle for less audio fatigue. (from 0.25 to 0.15)
  
• Fixed weird tiling texture on shooting range operations table.
  
• Improved the animation blending between enemy idle states such as a poacher who is not patrolling but busy carving up an animals and their transition from that state into battle when alerted.
  
• Characters are now nameless as the names don't add any value, and the player can now decide in their own head what they wish the characters to be called.
  
• Improved quality of glass shattering when shooting out vehicle windows.
  
• Character selection rotation is now faster/more snappy.
  
• Improved quality of weapon wheel selection when using a mouse.
  

Fixes

• Fixed missing Vehicle Garage option from personal computer when using the upgraded mobile home instead of the caravan.
  
• Fixed an issue with knife in zebra ragdoll near mission 1 camp disappearing from certain angles due to misconfigured occlusion culling.
  
• When cinematic music is playing it is lowered when listening to the rock music station.
  

The game's Ostrich Racing mini-game has been expanded to a full championship with 8 races to complete, each unlocked by coming first place in the previous match. Win all 8 races to win an achievement, as well as the option to compete for fastest times in the global leaderboards.

In addition to this update, a few small other changes have been made as per usual.

Main Update Features:

• 7 New ostrich races.
  
• Unlockable race flow.
  
• Ostrich Race improvements.
  
• New per-track global leaderboards.
  
• New achievement.
  

Fixes:

• Fixed issue that allowed weapons to be brought onto the ostrich racing course, even though you aren't able to use them since friendly fire is disabled for NPC teammates and there are no enemies to fight.
  
• Small navmesh issues fixed.
  
• Turning on a radio in caravan/shebeen will now resume from whichever channel you were previously listening to.
  
• Covered up some more exposed tree roots without backfaces.
  
• Fixed fencing that allowed illegitimate entrance into the distant informal settlement.
  
• Fixed intersecting hat on one of the NPC ostrich racers.
  
• Fixed options page 1 'Reset To Default' setting HUD Scale to 0.
  

Details:

• Added new beer radio advert that can be heard upon entering the bar for the first time.
  
• Added new beer branding to the bar taps.
  

Other:

• Made music station and talk radio station relative volumes more balanced to each other.
  
• Added more trees in terrain quadrant 5.
  
• Offset animation frames for NPC ostrich racers so they are not always perfectly synced for realism.
  

Optimizations:

• Removed blood instantiation pool from memory in scenes that do not have any fighting. (Such as ostrich racing etc)
  
• Optimized ostrich animation controller and memory footprint.
  
• Removed an unused hat from character avatar memory resources.
  

Steam Page Updates:

• New box art cover that uses game screenshots for a more accurate representation of the games apperance as opposed to artwork that doesn't look exactly like the game.
  
• Updated Demo to use lastest media art assets in Steam.
  

Happy racing!