stratvox

I don't think it's an accident that Thomson's Crossing is just up the creek from there.

Got a new old one: 

In the Woods, 1917

On 12/22/2021 at 4:43 PM, jeffpeng said:

You should see the code for that thing. It's the single most complex part of the entire game algorithm-wise.

I can sort of see how that would be. For one, the paths of the snowflakes... there's a lot of complexity happening there depending on wind conditions. Also the multi-layered nature of the snow renders with different cutouts depending on what's closer vs further away than the layer from the camera (i.e. the shape of the layer is occluded by objects closer to you than the layer, whether that be a pillar on a porch or a narrowing of a gorge). This last is really the one that really makes it imho; all of us who live in winter countries have seen how complex snow movement in air can be and the simulation of that in the game is really good.

Do you have access to the sources? Or are you running it in a debugger without the benefit of symbols?

On 12/22/2021 at 1:49 PM, jeffpeng said:

(need to get those 100 cloth home, urgh)

I feel this.

On 12/14/2021 at 9:27 PM, Stazco said:

As for next gen update - strange, the long dark has some indy style light graphics, so imo there is no need to waste time to upgrade from 1080p to 4k.

There are things that happen when you move from HD to 4k in the engine that are really good, in large part because of what happens wrt what you can see at long distances. Also, the trees are well made for 4k. The (many!) big vistas in the game look incredible at 4k because of this.

Because you can see so far in the regions when you're at the right locations I think it would be really cool if Hinterland could do something similar to LGhassan's work in scatterer for KSP, which models rayleigh scattering and light extinction at the terminator; being able to see proper directional layout for colour banding in the sky for the sunsets and sunrises would be incredible. I also think that given the art style it would be really cool to be able to exploit some of the ray tracing features the new cards are coming out with; in particular, imagine how beautiful it would be to see a properly degraded real time reflection of the aurora in the surfaces of the lakes, or on other ice-covered surfaces such as near waterfalls? Given the overall art style of the game (which is heavily based on iconic Canadian painters such as Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, and the Group of Seven) I can easily see how some of these new technologies could be integrated into the overall look of the game while remaining very true to the inspirational material it's based on.

I'll chime in and echo the general agreement about the game. It's a great game, and a real gem. I'd like to put in a special word for the team that makes the weather; this is hands down the best implementation of winter weather I've ever seen in a game. It's not even close. There are so many little things about how it works that the team really gets right. Superb work.

All of this is coming across as TMI.

/me flees.....

3 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I'd personally be fine with even that HOWEVER I don't see who you could retool Unix command line tools to work with an API - but I'm up for that challenge! Just no freaking Lua.

Well, if you can convert the structures into text and back again into C# objects you could... something like JSON would probably do it.

22 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

If, however, there is any way you could NOT use Lua for mods I would highly appreciate that.

sh or gtfo

/me flees....

22 minutes ago, SpanishMoss said:

I wonder if the vest stops moose attacks from giving broken ribs...

That's pretty much what I thought might be the big benefit from that one; you take a beating but you can run and climb afterwards.

Oh yeah, you're one of those dastardly SW Ontario people  gotcha!

I see your point about KP. I am much more familiar with it as it's about a half hour walk from my house. Lots of famous inmates lived there that make even Mathis and Donner look relatively tame.

If you happen to come this way (i.e. Kingston) ping me here and we'll go grab a drink or some such; I've been playing in bars here for decades so I know all the good spots

Cheers!

Right on! Glad to see this land! Here's hoping the bugs are few and easily fixed, and I hope everyone has a great winter break!

This game looks so great at 4K. Check out this detail from the pics I just posted above: 

Look at those trees. Just look at 'em. Really great design.

Down to the valley below.

Here's an imgur link for the full 4K glory. 

The real answer to tinder plugs is to stop chopping up cedar except in dire emergencies. They wear your tool down for less reward; reserve your hatchet to chop up fir. And self defence, of course. Chopping cedar is the number one source of tinder plug proliferation.

In my view, the one change I'd maybe like to see to firestarting is that tinder adds to the chance to light a fire after level 3, but is no longer required to be able to even try to start the fire. Drop all the base chances to start the fire by one in twenty and have the presence of tinder contribute that one in twenty back to the fire starting chance. Have it continue to do so while no longer required (level 3 and up), but allow the player to try and start the fire at the lower chance of success.

The weights are a thing that are part of the magical realism of this game. Just like aurora powering up computers and lights and radios and radio stations (!), aurora driving predators crazy, fires set outdoors lasting longer when the temperature is colder, fire in Mountaineer's lasting longer because it's burning while you happen to be outside where it's cold, unheated buildings maintaining a constant temperature just below freezing when it's forty below outside... need I go on? I mean, the buildings, that's second law of thermodynamics right there, doesn't get much more outside of reality than that.

They're there to be learned and exploited, to make life easier for your survivor. And there are ones that flip the script, like OMB and the crafted wound dressings. Given the time frame for infection to set in, crafting omb into the dressing after the mauling and bandaging so you can apply is not a major issue, so long as you have enough omb on you... and if you leave them uncrafted you can carry more omb which means you're able to carry more dressings, so the knowledge does help you. It's up to the player to notice and figure them out.

3 hours ago, ajb1978 said:

Those preplace carcasses though, the timer only starts when you click on it to inspect it.

At the moment it appears that the timer on them starts when you enter a region for the first time; I've seen how all the ravaged carcasses are gone after a few days in; I've got a guy in HRV and all the carcasses went away a few days after entering the region. I'm pretty sure this is a bug and I believe Hinterland officially knows about it.

Dry like the Gobi Desert seems to be the consensus.

Oh I hear you there. I'd love it if the game could model real snowfall, with drifts and everything. It'd add a whole new level of challenge to the game. Waking up and needing to dig out from the Camp Office because a big snowdrift blew up against the front of the building overnight during the blizzard. Turn snowshoes into a real thing that would matter. Or Ice Age mode, say: the snow once fallen never goes away and as the game progresses all the structures and trees slowly get buried beneath the snow until you're wandering across a barren snowscape. That would be incredible. 

I'd be more inclined to think you should look at other programs on the system that might be hitting your CPU hard... HP tends to ship a lot of shovelware on their laptops, and even outright crap like McAfee or Nortons. When I get laptops that are destined for Windows I tend to download the Microsoft image and install that instead of using the software that comes from the manufacturer because the manufacturer's version usually includes a bunch of crappy software. It's just easier than going into the control panel and removing all the crap via add/remove programs...

In all seriousness, I bet that your antivirus is looking at the running instance of the game periodically to see if it's being "suspicious" (this is generally referred to as heuristic analysis in the literature); you may find that you can tell it to not bother looking at that program or you can maybe find a better antivirus than the one your using; both mcafee and nortons suck.

Nice, as I recall there's some amazing country up there; been a while since I was up that way (like forty years a while).

On 11/27/2021 at 9:23 PM, UTC-10 said:

I discovered that down in the bowels of the Cinder Hills Mine Aurora annex that I could read the Advanced Guns Guns Guns (AGGG) book during the day while sitting waiting for the day to pass (and hopefully the aurora would appear to let me out).  

I recently tried using a hacksaw to cut up a metal shelving in the annex.  I found that during the day, not during the night, I could actually cut up the shelving without igniting a light source.  The same thing on the access passage to the elevator where there was a couple of metal shelving.  Now on that level technically there still was the "door" to the outside.  

This led me to think that if I can do that in the annex then how about in the upper part of Cinder Hills Mine (not the annex) which has a work bench?  I had never tried this because, obviously, it is DARK in there and no campfires means torches, flares or lanterns.  I went into the Cinder Hills Mine work bench and tried crafting a simple something or mending something, without a light source, and I could do it in the dark as long as it was day outside.  

Interesting.  I hope this would not be considered a bug and get "fixed".  I would find that very regrettable.  

Not quite on subject but only found out recently.  

This is not a bug, and the game has worked this way for years. It makes sense from a gameplay POV; trying to drag enough fuel into some of those mine worktables to be able to make a really big item like say bear coat would be completely impracticable.

I'm pretty sure that this is a "this game mechanic will blow out our computational complexity so we can't do it" situation.

On 10/21/2021 at 8:58 AM, Cr41g said:

Actually Blackrock isn't that unreasonable... Kingston Penitentiary here was a maximum security facility built in 1835... designed to hold 600 inmates the population at one time exceeded 900 resulting in riots in 1954 and 1971. Budget cuts saw the end of KP in 2013 and at the time it housed a small number of Canada's most infamous. It could be assumed Blackrock could be similar to this example and the bus could have been taking inmates FROM the facility and not TO (or I could be wrong if information was revealed in episode 4 which I cannot play)

You in Kingston?

I often leave stores of wood at key locations as I travel through regions... it makes it frustrating when Hinterland needs to tweak a region and moves 'em all into the lost and found boxes

The note about a couple of pieces of emergency coal is also well taken, esp when playing with max coldness over time, like in interloper.

At the Pensive Pond, I'd've definitely gone for the cave... but I've also had survivors live in that cave for several months at a time (try it it's one of the better locations to live in PV so much wood in the area and good quality fir not that cheap cedar crap  ) so I'm intimately familiar with the surroundings.

And yeah... PV is pretty much the region where six hours of wood might not be enough to get through a blizzard; pretty much any other region you'd've lived.

I voted for this. Well deserved imho.