Timber Wolf

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Posts posted by Timber Wolf

  1. On 9/24/2018 at 1:36 PM, TheRealPestilence said:

    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?

    This is very much true.  You can find the (relatively) exact scent values here - Scent Mechanics

    I don't see any problem with the implementation of the scent meter.  How much help do you need?  If you put any type of meat in your pocket, it will be detectable by predators (both in this game and in real life).

    Additionally, I really don't think it makes much of a difference at all, in terms of how much or what type of meat you are carrying.  It is very difficult to determine the distance between your character and the predators, and I haven't observed differences based on what I am carrying.  I am, however, looking into a couple of different methods to possibly determine the distance mathematically.  It is a difficult work in progress.

     

  2. Hello @Drifter Man, @Ruruwawa, @Hotzn, and @JAFO!  I don't mean to leave anyone else out, so greetings from @Timber Wolf to all you other TLD players!

    I find this to be a very interesting challenge.  As it is stated - you must begin the challenge in a random spot, which does make sense, but I wonder...

    I am curious, have any of you actually attempted to start the challenge on TWM and go directly to the summit?  There is an abundance of items to be found in the Tail Section that I believe would be a game changer in this situation. 

    I have made it most of the way up the rope to the summit before heading into the Long Dark.  I'm sure with more attempts I will be able to find a way to do it successfully.

    I've never really been into the extreme sandbox games, but this one does interest me - at least from a theoretical standpoint.  Please let me know, if anyone would like insights as to how you can get to the summit in the first few days, under these extremely adverse settings.

    Timber Wolf

    P.S.  I was so happy to see you are still rocking it out, @Drifter Man!  Thank you again for all of your awesome contributions to the knowledge base of this game!

    • Upvote 2
    • Like 1
  3. 4 minutes ago, mystifeid said:

    Yep, damn tasty too. Just try not to walk on any one-armed corpses you find lying around.

    How the hell have you been?

    Ya know - just rocking in the "free world". B|

    Here in Minnesota, winter is really coming.  Large amounts of snow was in our future, but only a little bit fell.  I'm sure more will arrive soon enough.  In the meantime, jack frost has been spotted on the radar and is going to rip off my nips in the days to come!

  4. 13 minutes ago, Riotintheair said:

    If that damage applies infrequently enough it really would be masking a duration of fight effect and slightly longer fights at high fatigue would be mitigated by still not being long enough to add another wolf damage tick and so would have the same point estimate on 20 trials (which have high variance as is).  Such a difference would then be more obvious at lower button press frequency. IE in your test the lifetime of the fight is short relative to wolf's damage interval, so you mask some potential affects related to that lifetime.

    I need to run some more tests. :)

  5. 7 minutes ago, Riotintheair said:

    It responds to button mashing, and seems tied to how tired I am, but doesn't seem at all tied to what is happening in the struggle.

    I think you've summed it up perfectly.  I don't think what it displays is particularly meaningful.

  6. 9 hours ago, WanderingPalm said:

    Are Striking Events at random intervals? Or set? Can you measure Struggles by the number of Events you suffered? If we know each Event does about X damage, and we’ll suffer at least Y Events, then that tells us the danger of the encounter even better than the tests that show the total damage from an encounter.

    I don't think the events are random, but rather they occur at different intervals depending on how fast you are clicking.  Each events seems to incur different amounts of condition loss, some small and some large.
     

    9 hours ago, WanderingPalm said:

    I find it hard to believe that a longer fight had no different outcome, and am wondering if, perhaps, you were simply too efficient in fighting it off to see the consequences of fighting while exhausted. :P

    This would be true if you had to completely fill the bar in order to end the struggle.  However, I rarely ever see the bar fill all the way up in my struggles.  And when I'm exhausted I only get it about half way filled before the struggle comes to an end.

  7. 10 hours ago, 4djes said:

    Only game pad? No keyboard?

    Yes, the Xpadder program is only for setting up a game pad.  I'm sure there are other macro program out there that could be used for keyboard/mouse, but I don't know of any off-hand. 

  8. 1 hour ago, earthy said:

    In the exhausted state you seemed to experience quite a few short(<10%condition lost) struggles, which seem to heavily influence the average.

    Valid point.  I may run some more to see if the average holds.

    1 hour ago, earthy said:

    I'm also inclined to think hatchet may not be the best choice for a test like this, given that shorter duration struggles would be more prone to variance influencing the conclusion.

    The primary reason I run these tests is to find out the best way to survive them.  I'm probably going to continue to use the hatchet (which has always shown as the best weapon) in all future tests, unless I run through all the weapons again just for confirmation.  I don't think there's much to be gained by trying to only test struggles that tend to last longer.

    1 hour ago, earthy said:

    Do you expect the results of Normal vs Exhausted in interloper would show the same trend?

    Yes, I suspect it would show the same trend.  I may do further testing to put some numbers to it.

  9. So, how important is it to have protective clothing?  I ran more tests while wearing a new wolfskin coat, deerskin pants, deerskin boots, rabbit mittens, and a toque - giving me 29% protection.

    59e292c1d3406_1.15ConditionTestsInterloperClothesvsNoClothes.thumb.jpg.76a32574c35c3bf47994849caeabf1f2.jpg

    59e292c0693f3_1.15ConditionChartInterloperClothesvsNoClothes.thumb.jpg.25ff79b070aee2e1580f32558d97f681.jpg

    59e292c1165a4_1.15ConditionSDAVGInterloperClothesvsNoClothes.jpg.80d9f51cbaa5f531313258ae5165d7c4.jpg

    An interesting side note - I scared off the wolf 18 times while getting these 50 results.  So, the scare rate was 18/68 = 26.5%

    • Upvote 3
  10. Just now, Salty Crackers said:

    How did you get a hatchet in Interloper? If you're using the improvised hatchet, the results will change drastically, regardless of which difficulty. I would recommend using the hammer for the Stalker v. Interloper tests.

    Sorry, I should have been more specific.  I used an improvised hatchet for both the Stalker and Interloper tests.

  11. On 9/30/2017 at 2:22 PM, WanderingPalm said:

    Surely fighting the wolf for longer would make you more susceptible to taking damage (regardless of what the exhaustion test showed). Or am I wrong in thinking that the duration is less variable than damage?

    Here's my best explanation:

    Each wolf struggle will likely have multiple individual striking events, for both your character and the wolf.  The very first striking event will be the wolf's, unless you click in the very short period of time between the struggle first beginning and the wolf initially making contact with you.  

    Each individual wolf striking event calculation begins by using Random Normal Distribution (the normal distribution is sometimes informally called the bell curve*) based on a predetermined condition loss value.  Then the clothing protection value is applied. *Edit: I also think the weapon choice probably has a value applied here.

    Each individual character striking event calculation begins by using Random Normal Distribution based on a predetermined condition loss value for the wolf.  Then the weapon choice value is applied.

    The struggle will continue until the wolf's condition falls below a particular threshold or your character dies.  Sometimes you can get in the first strike and win the struggle immediately, incurring no condition loss at all - or very little condition loss if you almost time it just right.  And I think the faster you click, the quicker you will have your next striking event. 

    *Excel-Random-Normal-Distribution-01.png.ececf0b3b6bcd951e4a573680b8c2fe7.png

  12. I wanted to find out the difference between the wolves in Stalker and Interloper, so I ran some more tests.  I used my standard scenario - 100% character, well rested, no clothes, 8.3 cps, and an improvised hatchet.  Here are the results:

    59e21b8f4fa19_1.15ConditionTestsInterlopervsStalker.thumb.jpg.7a7782e596b50cb40e858570407c8ee6.jpg

    59e21b8dc0162_1.15ConditionChartInterlopervsStalker.thumb.jpg.563c5219b2c2a4be73da86a0b918d8bf.jpg

    59e21b8e64f96_1.15ConditionSDAVGInterlopervsStalker.jpg.d0181151b109fde936e850b0c543bd1e.jpg

    • Upvote 2
  13. 19 hours ago, MarrowStone said:

    To me it almost looks like clothing is now the only factor and clicking.

    The weapon you select is still an important factor.  I've used the hatchet for all of these tests, because my previous testing showed it to be the best option.

  14. For this next group of tests I focused on the state of exhaustion and I started up a brand new game.  @TROY's question above made me curious as to what the results would look like if I did not use the macro, so I did a round of tests banging away on my controller as I do when I am normally playing the game.  When both of these rounds of tests showed numbers similar to the exhausted tests I ran in the first group, I decided to spin up version .426 using the same game save to see if anything has changed.  Here are the results:

    59c51d1b84fac_1.14ConditionTestsGroup2.thumb.jpg.10990cbe084544c98c47a06225bb25bb.jpg

    59c51e3764962_1.14ConditionChartsGroup2.thumb.jpg.5758b048cf43b68011597335d336025a.jpg

     

    As you can see, there was no meaningful difference between these tests.  So exhaustion might have once been a factor, but it appears it has not been for a while now.

    • Upvote 2