Milton Mailbag -- Dispatch #12

[Raphael van Lierop]

Hello community!

Here are some answers for this week's Milton Mailbag! Looks like the pace of questions has slowed down a bit so we may switch up this format to be bi-weekly instead, unless the volume of questions increases.

Remember, if you like the Mailbag feature, let us know by Liking/Upvoting the thread, and feel free to discuss the Mailbag topics on the Dispatch threads. Discussion encourages new questions!

Onward...

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Question from @Tylor9261:

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I've seen streamers mention legs and full body awareness like mittens and stuff in this game. And the foot prints in the snow are an awesome sense of immersion. Do you guys have plans to include legs and more full body awareness at either some point in TLD, or possibly your next title? I understand it must be a pretty big feature and design too with crouching and rock climbing animations to consider among other things like sprains and just artwork for legs too. 

Yeah we've done quite a bit of R&D on both full body awareness and also showing the equipped gear on the avatar (vs. defaulting to standard clothing regardless of what you've selected for your survivor). Both are pretty huge features and are things we've opted to put aside in favour of getting our Episodes out more quickly (yes, they already take too long!). I can't say for sure whether full-body awareness will end up in The Long Dark, but for sure our next game, if it's a first-person title, will have it. There have been about 1000 times on this project where I wish I could go back to the game's inception and invest more time and energy into animation and first-person presence -- we opted not to invest more in it then out of necessity, but in a way it's kind of "haunted" us ever since. That said, it's also forced us to experiment with other ways to help players feel immersed in the game world, and those learnings will also help us making hopefully even more compelling experiences in the future.

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Question from @Smellyfries:

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How difficult was it to create Hushed River Valley? 

A lot more difficult than we anticipated! The gameplay and design part wasn't too challenging -- we knew we'd need a few new elements to help guide the player around the region as we typically rely on human-made landmarks for that, and without them it's very easy to become hopelessly lost, so things like the improved waterfalls, the ice caves, the signal fires were all tools we created to help players find their way around better. The art side was really challenging though. We tried a few new workflows for creating content that would allow several artists to work on the same region at the same time (something that is notoriously tricky to do well in Unity), we implemented a new kind of rock and had to learn how to build with it, and the region ended up having a really heavy object density due to all the environment details, so optimization was a challenge. We set ourselves the goal of creating a region that could be compelling without the addition of human-made structures, and one that would test our player's capabilities as wilderness survivors, so hopefully we accomplished that! But it did take a lot more time and effort than we originally anticipated. Trying new things and building them in new ways often does.

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Question from @AnonymousLikeAways:

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Would it be possible to implement the ability to add more markers to the maps? I understand that the system already adds them for pre-existing landmarks, but would it be possible to players to add their own?

It could/would be possible to add more player-placed landmarks in the world, but updating the map with them is pretty tricky as the map gets built when the region is first instanced in the game world (to account for the randomly placed elements). But I'm pretty sure this is something we could solve if we put our minds to it.  

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Question from @StrayCat:

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The custom settings are notorious for not working as intended : for example, many players see next to no difference in wolves' behaviour when changing the value "wolf fear". Other settings sometimes just work randomly. Do you intend to fix the custom mode ?

Or, can it be we are wrong and the custom mode is working as intended ? If so, may you someday give us a detailled grid of what every setting  precisely do, please ? We have a really hard time getting the setting as we intend them to be, with a lot of frustrating try&miss. Thank you and keep up the good work !

 

Yes, we have some work to do to improve the Custom Settings. 

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Question by @TheRealPestilence:

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Wolves are clearly strongly attracted to player characters who are carrying only .01kg of high condition cooked meat, yet such a small quantity of meat results in no scent indicator when the player displays the status overlay.  Many players still don't understand this and claim the wolf AI is just incredibly sadistic, particularly stalker players.

Is this mechanic an off by one bug or an attempt to give players a false sense of security?

 

It's hard for me to qualify what you mean by "strongly attracted" as this may or may be true depending on a variety of circumstances, including Experience Mode and Custom Settings. But in general, you should assume that *any* amount of Blood, whether it's blood loss, raw meat, fish, and to a lesser degree, cooked items, and the accumulation of those things, will make you "smelly" as far as predators are concerned. Every food item in the game has a "scent" value, which also plays into how effectively it serves as a Decoy when dropped. The issue I think you're highlighting here is more about the UI and how we communicate scent that way, which is kind of a clumsy visualization but lacks some of the granularity you may need. Before we added the "scent" HUD element, wildlife would be attracted to any of these things, and the addition of the scent HUD element hasn't changed this. It's just changed how players perceive it.

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(Ignoring questions I've responded to before; check the new index on responses to search for topics from previous Dispatches)

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Question from @paulrysavy:

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Do you plan ad more regions to the game, in the Retail Launch Trailer we saw a bridge many cars in front of it, and in the story is a prison in the great bear island, do you plan add this places to the game?

Yes, we will add new regions to the game. Not going to get into specifics at this point, though.  

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Looks like that's all for this week! Thanks for your questions and I hope you enjoyed the answers.

- Raph

[Admin]

Please use this thread for discussion of @Raphael van Lierop's answers. However, while we will be monitoring the thread, he won't be following up on questions here. If you have more questions please post them in the main question thread and they may be addressed in a future Milton Mailbag.

If you want to know if a topic has been addressed please check the Milton Mailbag Index.

[Pillock]

42 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

Question from @StrayCat:

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The custom settings are notorious for not working as intended : for example, many players see next to no difference in wolves' behaviour when changing the value "wolf fear". Other settings sometimes just work randomly. Do you intend to fix the custom mode ?

Or, can it be we are wrong and the custom mode is working as intended ? If so, may you someday give us a detailled grid of what every setting  precisely do, please ? We have a really hard time getting the setting as we intend them to be, with a lot of frustrating try&miss. Thank you and keep up the good work !

Yes, we have some work to do to improve the Custom Settings. 

From my point of view, the most obvious "broken" thing about my Custom games is that Cabin Fever appears not to work or be enabled, even if you select it. I actually have noticed differences between the Wolf Fear settings, so that's not a problem I recognise. But improvements to the Custom Settings would be very welcome indeed, especially if they allow for more precise selection of variables (eg. I'd like to be able to select a precise range for how many rifles and other 'tools' are available in the world as a whole).

I agree with @StrayCat: a detailed explanation of precisely what each setting for each variable means in practice would be really helpful, whether or not the settings themselves were improved or expanded upon.

[paulrysavy]

Thanks @Raphael van Lierop ,it was tricky  answer, but i don't have another choice ... I must wait longer ... I'm in Coastal Highway if you're looking for me.

[Pillock]

On 9/28/2018 at 5:15 PM, admin said:

If you want to know if a topic has been addressed please check the Milton Mailbag Index.

This is excellent, thanks.

[Blinkin]

Custom mode being improved sound like something to look forward to after the episode update. The wolf settings are either broken or some of us don't understand the correctly. Although I don't think that having games with low changes of wolves an a low attraction should result in more wolf attacks than on normal settings..

Thanks for the lovely mailbag!

[slvrsrfr]

it's great to see the feedback form the staff, please continue. Even if the questions dry up. Maybe updating answers, rephrasing, following up, or asking for more clarification. But continue the conversation. While it may not be the original poster, things you say or mention may spark new angles. Develop some means or method to keep this channel of communication open and in good practice. It's like a muscle, you gotta use it. ;p

Stay warm.

[Hotzn]

Thanks for this further dispatch. I noticed the questions becoming less as well - that's probably natural, since previous mailbag dispatches have already answered many pressing questions. I personally am quite satisfied for the moment. Slowing down the dispatches to one every two weeks or even one per month would be totally in order for me. There will be new questions when the next update or further episodes come out, I guess. Which is not so very far off now, if I am not mistaken...

[ThePancakeLady]

I do enjoy being able to ask questions, sometimes have them answered, and seeing other people's questions answered as well. Sometimes I get answers to questions I did not know I even had, until I saw them asked here.  Please continue the feature, for as long as it feels pertinent to you, and fits into your busy schedule. Bi-weekly or even monthly, perhaps a 2 week offset after a Dev Diary, would be fine with me as well.

Looking forward to 4DoN coming up, and hoping my right shoulder is healed enough after my recent surgery, to allow me to use a controller or both keyboard and mouse to play again. I have been working with a modified version of both Voice Attack and Windows Speech Recognition, and have been able to get it working for mouse and speech-only controls on some games, but not TLD, yet. I'll keep working on it.

 

And... Happy Pancakes.