NEW FEATURE: Hunter jumping courses

One of the most common requests I get is to add hunter style jumping courses. To those of you who haven't heard of hunters, it's like a mix of dressage and showjumping. Showjumping is only judged by knocked poles and time, meaning that the boldest rider with the most risk-taking typically wins. Hunter jumping is artistic showjumping that also judges finer details such as horse's manners, rider's equitation, overall smoothness of riding, horse's jumping style, and even attire.

I wasn't originally planning on adding hunter courses since my country doesn't have them so I'm not that well versed on this equestrian sport. After looking more into it though I figured that adding hunter jumping would make a lot more use of the calmer horses. Majority of the calm horses are slower and their jump scope isn't super high so they used to become almost useless after the player reached a certain point in the game.

The hunter style courses in the game won't be fully based on hunter jumping in real life. They are more so hunter 'inspired' courses. Hunter jumping, much like dressage, is a complex sport with many subjective elements that are practically impossible to recreate and measure in a game environment. Think of things like equitation (how well the rider sits in the saddle) or attire (how good looking your tack is); these things are primarily judged by the subjective opinion of another person rather than an objective measuring device. 

I have so far come up with at least one way to measure the fluidity of riding in a hunter style competition, and that is the green bar at the bottom of the screen. This green bar collects data on how fast the horse is cantering throughout the course and compares it to the ideal canter speed for the course. In this case the ideal speed is set to 'mid canter', so any time the horse either drops down to 'slow canter' or bolts up to 'fast canter' the player starts losing smoothness points.

As you can see in the video, when I rode the course with the calm horse the smoothness score never dropped below perfect. With the hot blooded horse on the other hand.. 🤣

In the future I will continue testing additional ways to measure hunter riding. For instance it should be possible to measure how correct the jump distance was. Perhaps if the realistic jumping setting is turned on the game could even measure the exact strides taken between the jumps. (btw the blinking horseshoe on the screen is a stride counter that I've also added recently.)