stratvox

Recent trip to AC. Of course, the beauty of AC is getting to the high places and taking pics, so here are some from the High Meadow.

It is very much like that; a central inspiration is seti@home style BOINC networks but with a single language being able to be used on multiple hardware platforms: currently on the BOINC networks it's necessary to write clients for each platform you want to support. We allow a write once run anywhere with an ECMA 1.6 compatible interpreter that supports bignum, which is almost anything. We've even had a worker running on a fridge and a washing machine in the lab; they had a javascript interpreter built in because they were used to build the GUIs on the devices.

I think one of the plugs we should be using is "The Distributed Computer's machine language is javascript." 

We have also used wasm and are developing a set of libs we're calling bifrost to allow cross code generation from commonly used languages in the scientific and math communities like python and R. I'm not super up on all the deets on how all that works; I'm the guy that keeps the machines running more than writing the software for them.

If you're interested in looking at it more you can visit https://distributed.computer, https://kingsds.network, and https://portal.distributed.computer. The last in particular is where you'd set up an account and be able to run workers in web browsers to start getting tokens. We're still under very active development here but we're beginning to get some serious serious traction in both the science and biz worlds, along with some other niches, esp in health services. Of course, you can always ask me too; I can put you directly in touch with the folks doing the heavy dev on it.

And yeah, if you have a modern machine and on an architecture where we can exploit the gpu we can definitely help you heat the joint.

On 5/9/2022 at 6:31 PM, jeffpeng said:

It's just a shame apparently nobody can agree on a graphics API anymore.

Oh man. We're trying to figure out how to enable using graphics cards in worker systems to do (mostly) matrices and that is a massive pain. We're currently working on using webgl to enable it; it's easy for the version of our computation worker that runs in a browser but we also want to enable workers that run standalone and being able to exploit them is a challenge across the platforms. The APIs just keep proliferating. We can do Vulkan on linux and windows (and things like raspbian etc too because debian) but apple and other arm platforms are a whole 'nother world.

If you're interested, the big picture is that we're creating a way to allow people to buy and sell cpu cycles for computation, with an eye on scientific simulations. We hope to bring the current price (i.e. what people pay to rent machines at azure, amazon, and google) down significantly by allowing people to turn idle systems into computation workers for an exchange in tokens, and to have markets where people can buy and sell tokens for money. Sort of like using computers to crunch numbers to create crypto, except the idea is that the number crunching will have real social and monetary value so all that cpu time won't be for nought. We're eyeing scientific applications but we are also working with the health sector and so on to enable them to turn the office machines in hospitals etc into ad-hoc compute networks to allow them to benefit from ML apps for scheduling, or for health units to do pandemic test and trace analysis, and so on. There's a lot of potental applications for this tech, including video games; I foresee it being used for MMOGs to have the players run workers on spare cores to run the online game's "ecosystem" to help make the online worlds more "realistic".

One of my colleagues is the dude in charge of trying to corral all the various graphics APIs and every once in a while he just loooooses it.

Cool. I'm actually in the middle of using raspberry pis to save our firm a big pile of dough on workstations.

Pretty sure that this game won't run on that one... nope.

Good to hear that the prospects are good for the architecture.

Item weights are determined by gameplay value, rather than by resemblance to reality. In the early game the boost given to starting fires by the wood matches are what make them weigh more, not their weight in what we laughingly call "reality" (what is this "gainful employment" bull and why do I have to go?).

It's there to make you pick a tradeoff between the weight plus the higher fire start chance. This doesn't matter so much at the lower difficulty settings but as you go up (or down, depending on your POV ) the food chain towards interloper it starts to matter a lot more.

This is a slightly unconventional view...

On 4/7/2022 at 4:34 AM, zfp said:

Happy to hear it. I had another graphics issue with SSAO blobs/artifacts that seemed to be affected by wind, it was most noticeable around the hands when holding a revolver. Did you notice that?

Quote

No, not particularly. Well, I've noticed how sometimes wind and particular times of day can make for some interesting effects, but I've mostly noticed it with the grass terrain scatter. I've generally been a bow guy, and it's only lately that I've taken to carrying around the revolver because I've been spending a lot of time in BRM where it's definitely a big plus. I'll see if I can repro...

I'm not seeing that at all here. Running linux native version on an asus g15 (amd ryzen 5800hx + radeon rx6800m). There's a massive improvement overall with the linux version wrt video artifacting/quality with this revision. I don't remember that *particular* problem from before when running either the linux native or windows via proton version, but that may be dependent on a lot of things. For reference, I'm running ubuntu 21.10 with the kisak ppa mesa libraries and the open source radeon DRM kernel drivers.

4 hours ago, zfp said:

Happy to hear it. I had another graphics issue with SSAO blobs/artifacts that seemed to be affected by wind, it was most noticeable around the hands when holding a revolver. Did you notice that?

No, not particularly. Well, I've noticed how sometimes wind and particular times of day can make for some interesting effects, but I've mostly noticed it with the grass terrain scatter. I've generally been a bow guy, and it's only lately that I've taken to carrying around the revolver because I've been spending a lot of time in BRM where it's definitely a big plus. I'll see if I can repro... 

I suspect that what's really going on is that the upgrade to a newer version of unity in this update brought in a bunch of engine bug fixes on the linux side. Which is not to minimise it; I can say that having helped out when pushing tools up a major revision in the back end of software that it can be a big big job making those transitions.

I am happy to be able to report that the z-fighting in the landscape has been fixed in the linux version of the game. Thank you! @jeffpeng you'll be happy to hear this!

End of a long afternoon that started at Mountaineer's and ended in the bear bag at the other end of Cinder Hills. Day 275 and I'm just entering CH for the first time; this one started in HRV and in the first week ran about collecting arrows and since then has been strictly up in the mountains, bouncing around between TWM, AC, and BRM.

I'm coming down to CH because it's also known as Cloth Heaven and I'm starting to run low up in the mountains. I'm planning on returning with a few kilos of cloth in ... a few weeks? a month or two? always hard to plan the specifics in this game.

After spending app. 3 months each in TWM and BRM and a month in AC, AC is definitely the tougher region for long term survival due to the paucity of wildlife compared to TWM and BRM.

At any rate, the sky cleared up at dusk as I was walking the high road to the mine so I took this shot of the valley laid out before me. You can see the hall at Thompson's Crossing. 

Lovely but cold cold day in Timberwolf, got a not-so-usual view of the peaks nearby and a nearly side-on view of the tail section.

Got lucky with where the two bears bled out... one in the cave in echo peak west and the other up by the waterfall. What are the odds?

Decided to make my way back into Black Rock Mountain, on my way up to the cave that leads there I grabbed this quick one of Echo Ravine.

Here's another one I took on the way up; you can just make out the hut if you squint.

Some time later, here I am at the substation in BRM. Grabbing a quick one of the early morning sun, clear and limpid but cold cold cold despite no wind to speak of.

Later on I'm getting ready to climb up the back way into the Pen, looking down the river towards the power dam.

1 hour ago, Catlover said:

Not seen an aurora in a while, forgotten quite how vibrant they are!

Also, it's probably too dark to tell but I'm curious, can anyone guess where I am? Bonus points if you guess where I'm near   (hint, it involves vehicles)

1 hour ago, Catlover said:

@LeeandaUnfortunately that is quite a ways off but good guess! 

Hopefully these will make it a bit easier

Point of Disagreement in PV, near where the rope climb into TWM is.

Cool... glad to hear it. 

HRV is a great interloper start; all the top tier stuff available in interloper is available on the map, once you know where to find it. I love HRV; while it's challenging the amount of natural resources on that map is off the hook.

I suspect that the earlier poster is right about stuff going when the corpses go; that's a definite bug in the latest release and it causes a tremendous amount of loot to despawn before the player can get to it and there are a LOT of bodies in HRV. The bug looks to me like they all despawn (along with any ravaged deer carcasses) three days after the player enters a region for the first time, as if they were normal animal carcasses killed by the player.... fwiw.

Try playing with the SSAO setting in Options -> Quality

I read in the steam deck announcement that you folks have done work that will improve rendering in Linux. Does this mean we can finally expect to see the years-old flickering landscape under Linux problem to finally be fixed? I’d love to be able to switch back to running the Linux version of the game instead of the windows version under Linux using the proton compatibility libraries. 

Doesn't get much more convenient than this:

23 hours ago, SpanishMoss said:

Maybe not painkillers, but after cooking 5 antibiotics become totally useless

If you get into a struggle and end up with an infection (i.e. you don't/can't treat it with antiseptic or omb and it progresses to infection) you will need antibiotics or shroom tea to treat it.

Thing is in a very long run game (i.e. far longer than I've ever made it) I could see that leading to inevitable death; when you run out of omb and antiseptic you will get infections; after that every struggle will eventually require treatment with antibiotics and/or shroom tea, and when you've emptied the world of those the next infection you acquire from a struggle will kill you as you will be unable to treat it.

10 hours ago, I_eat_only_wolf_meat said:

Postcard from my stay at the cannery residences

 

"HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD OF OUR LORD URSA MAJOR?"

5 minutes ago, Leeanda said:

Not much use if you're already freezing in the middle of a blizzard then? 🙂

Oh no. You've got a very good chance of still being alive at the end of it. What you really don't want is to have your clothing be soaked going into it.

Came across another one from the TT memorial twitter feed. It’s a beaut: “Pine Trees at Sunset, 1915

They are despawning after three days like all the other carcasses. This happens three days after you enter a region for the first time, so when you enter a new region you've got three days to get 'em all.

Gotta get 'em all!

Yes, I feel that this is a bug and not intended; that said, having them disappear and putting them all on a 15-30 day randomized timer to respawn is not a terrible way to change it... have spawn points for the carcasses, have half of 'em spawn when the player first enters a region, and then start respawning each of the spawn points 15-30 days after the previous carcass despawns.

Outside on a grey day.

I've wandered over to the other stone cabin; Bricklayer's and Mountaineer's are actually pretty close to each other. I got some stuff done during the day, but I think the evening's going to be a write off.

Wee bit frosty out there.

Think I'll stay in.