stratvox

I can add to this now. This morning I ran the upgrade from Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04. The stuttering issues went away completely; it was a nice nice change to see this back at full framerate (which for me is 60fps; no point in more frames than my monitor can do at 4k); I'm guessing that there's been an update to the media libraries in the upgrade that made this problem go away. My next test is to take out the taskset command in my command line and see if it's busted or not....

...and the answer is no. You still need taskset -c 0-15 %command% in your steam launch command for the game to be able to run.

I heard back from the proton/wine folks; they are looking forward to addressing the issues with some of the multimedia stuff when they get to it, which is to say they have bigger fish to fry than that right now. 🐟

ETA: @jeffpeng Yeah, I'd accounted for the difference between thread count and core count when I made that comment. At any rate, I can tell you that with the upgrade on my system to 20.04 (plus oibaf for very up to date mesa plus ukuu so I'm running 5.6.15-050615-generic), the game is performing like it should once again.

Oh, and the upgrade (19.10->20.04) was about as painless as it could possibly be.

Well, I've played further, and I was wrong. It's not fixed.

I just got an update via steam, and the stuttering situation appears to be fixed. Thanks!

I am playing on a 5700xt on linux as well, but running the Windows version of TLD via proton. I can't find the Player.log under this setup, but I can say that I'm experiencing the stuttering as well.

10 hours ago, zfp said:

Hi,

I have the same issue. Deleting/renaming said mp4 is a workaround. However the same error occurs when the game is trying to play an mp4, like when you start a wintermute episode. I suspect this would also work: https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install , but I haven't tried.

That completely worked!

Here's what I had to do:

mkdir ~/src

cd ~/src

git clone git@github.com:z0z0z/mf-install.git

WINEPREFIX="/home/<uid>/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/305620/pfx" PROTON="/home/<uid>/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 5.0" ./mf-install.sh -proton

This installs the fix you mention into the various right places for it to work.

Furthermore, due to a known bug in wine wrt microsoft's media implementation I had to restrict the number of cores the game will run on. I did this by inserting the following in the "Set Launch Options" field on the game in Steam: "taskset -c 1-8 %command%"

However, I need to do that because I have more than eight cores in this machine and the media stuff cacks out when you have too many cores. If you're not running on a sixteen core processor you won't need to do this.

Thanks a lot for the pointer, @zfp! It is working now! Much appreciated!

I very much doubt you're in trouble for posting this. You're experiencing something that is a limitation of video games in general; however it's more apparent in TLD because you are able to see much much further than you are in most video games (not many video games allow you to look at things that are a kilometre away). This is done for performance reasons; by cutting down on the number of items you see by only rendering items within x distance of you they are cutting down on the geometry that needs to be rendered by the video card resulting in better framerates. Many of the regions in my long run game (coming up on three years in game time) have literally thousands of entities lying around the map; wood, fireplaces, meat, dropped dead flares, and the like. Trying to get the game engine to render every one of those things in the map is going drive your video card into the dirt.

Fearless Navigator is broken as in the title.

@jeffpeng have you tried it yet? I'm wondering if the breakage is something about my system or is more general.

It appears to be having problems with the "intro_cards.mp4" file:

WindowsVideoMedia error 0x80004001 while reading Z:\home\jack\.local\share\Steam\steamapps\common\TheLongDark\tld_Data\StreamingAssets\Video\Windows\intro_cards.mp4

Context: MFCreateSourceReaderFromMediaSource
Error details: <Empty>
Track types:

 
(Filename:  Line: 2847)

Hinterland support got right back to me (thanks guys!) but I suspect their answer indicates they didn't quite realise what the runtime environment is.

Cheers!
 

I definitely did when I decided to fire up a new game a week or three back. Very different experience wrt feathers from before.

11 hours ago, Fuarian said:

What happens if the other player is halfway across Great Bear wandering around through a blizzard and the other player desperately needs to sleep or they'll die?

Does Player A choose to let Player B sleep to recover condition, forcing Player A to pass time in the blizzard and freeze? Or does Player B let Player A wander through the blizzard, getting lost only to find shelter hours later, by then Player B didn't sleep and has died. 

This just wouldn't work.

I think the way to deal with this would be that the other player can sleep, but time won't accelerate for them until it does for the other player (i.e. they go to sleep, start reading, cook, etc).

That said, time compression is a major feature of the game (imagine if you have to wait for 48 minutes while your character sleeps for eight hours before you can play again) and that makes dealing with multiplayer extremely difficult. It's the same problem that KSP has for MP; you can't time compress your trip to Jool in a multiplayer game so you're going to have to wait for what would be literally a LOT of days real time.

That said, I too would love to have a multiplayer mode in this game, but at least some of the game mechanics would need to be reworked very heavily and I think it's reasonable to say that it will never happen with this generation of the game.

I have also found this to be the case.

Hmmm, maybe I should load up an old save from before the Errant Pilgrim and see if it works that way there too.

I can already tell you that this is the case.

Raph has said that the mill in BI is going to get expanded; I figure that down the road it may become possible to craft firearms in interloper there; perhaps one will be able to find one broken rifle and one broken revolver across the entire game and be able to repair them at the cannery, as well as craft ammunition for them.

I'm also kind of hoping that it may be possible to craft/repair better bow hunting gear; say metal shafted arrows and a compound bow or something like that.

3 minutes ago, romerabr said:

I need to test again, but I think that ruined clothes don't dissappear. 

Anything that's harvestable after ruination will stay. That's why food disappears and clothing doesn't.

I found this compelling because it's both beautiful and how it shows a geological transition between exotic terranes, typical of the coast of British Columbia.

Cave on Mystery Lake.

Moonrise in Bleak Inlet.

Is it possible you have a little bit of time left on the crafting of the pants? Have you tried using a workbench to see if you can work on them? I have made that mistake before... thought something was done and couldn't figure out why I couldn't put it on. Turned out I needed to put another forty minutes (0.667 hrs) into it.

Hm, well... I pretty much always sleep in the outdoor part of caves next to a fire; best way to avoid cabin fever... and in general my guy spends a lot of time in caves because there are some serious advantages (not least of which is the wood cold bonus).

Never leave a bedroll rolled out. I learned that one quite a ways back. Even without animal damage, rolled-out bedrolls decay insanely quickly.

That sounds like a bug. Question... did you leave the bedroll rolled up or laid out?

I'd suggest going to the support portal and leaving a report.

Hey! Where are you from up there? I'm down at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence in Kingston.

Bedroll, the clothing on your back, bandages, antiseptic/OMB (n.b. omb unprocessed is lighter than the wound dressing you craft out of it), a hatchet for wolf struggles, a knife because damn they can save you some time when you really need to save some time, a bow, a dozen arrows, the satchel if you've got one, a few fish lines, a sewing kit, matches (and mags lens if you've got one), tinder if under fire 3, five sticks (I tried four sticks because Zep but really you want five, though it's less of an issue now that coal can be added right away... and @Raphael van Lierop and Hinterland, it was better that you had to warm up the fire to get coal into it imho), two or three stones to throw to distract patrolling wolves, a dozen or so cat tail stalks as an emergency road nom supply so I can keep my well fed going.

A good survival strategy is to leave caches of firewood in any caves you find; enough wood to keep a fire going for five or six hours is all you really need, so when a blizzard blows in you can scamper to the nearest cave and get a fire going. Not so necessary in the maps with lots of buildings, but HRV, TWM, and PV all have wide stretches of shelterless areas where having a nice cache of firewood will go a long way to keeping you alive if a blizzard blows in.

Those caches are why I don't really like the lost and found boxes. In my long run games when I enter a place I haven't been to since those were updated I'll find dozens of kilos of firewood in the lost and found boxes at the region entrances and now the caves are no refuge from blizzards until I can restock them with wood.

2 hours ago, Sherri said:

It could even be craftable with a needle from a sewing kit & a magnet- maybe salvaged from all the useless car radios (technically from the speakers).

It seems like an item that would be common in a place like this. Heck, I own 3 lol.

Part of the game setting is that a "mysterious geomagnetic event" has destroyed all the electronics in the world. This is plausible; google "carrington event" to see a historical example from the late 19th century. I think that putting a coronal mass ejection from the sun that hits the earth together with the commencement of a magnetic pole flip would be completely devastating in the way that the game shows, as well as also meaning that compasses wouldn't work afterwards; the best science we have on magnetic pole flips is that they last for a significant period of time (possibly as long as a thousand years before the earth's magnetic field returns to normal-but-inverted) and during that entire period compasses would be useless because the field would be chaotic in the way that it is for the sun; see for example 

You can slip and slide down the front of the mountain and make it all the way down to the Mountaineer's Cabin without using a rope once.

And yeah... when you're making for the summit, you want to travel light; your clothes, a moose-hide satchel if you've got one, hatchet, knife, some matches and a few sticks, maybe a dozen cat-tails, a bow and half a dozen arrows for self-defence, maybe a litre or so of water upon setting out (working on the idea that you'll have finished it by the time you make your descent), and one or two OMB dressings and processed berries in case you need them, and that's about it. You can make the summit in one day if you put your mind to it; if you need to spend the night in the plane there's lots of wood around to build an all-night long fire to survive the night, then load up, get down into the bottom part of the plane, and then start making your way down. Make sure you don't stray too far off to the left because that'll put you down into the ravine. After you get down to where the containers are directly below the plane, go towards the right so you can make your way down to the river and then follow it to Crystal Lake and the cabin.

Yes. I have had that happen to me in FM.

ETA: and oh boy did it ever suck when it happened. It nearly killed me.

On 4/21/2020 at 3:58 PM, bad94 said:

hey jeff & stratvox I really enjoyed reading your technical discussion and wish I knew a little more about sys admin stuff / computer architecture. Two questions which I have which are maybe off topic but I trust your opinions:

1) i use ubuntu daily for work but usually use windows to game and i have a dual boot on my laptop. I did once install the steam client on ubuntu. do you guys game using linux or windows?

2) Any suggestions for a gaming laptop? my current lap op only has an integrated video card and I would love to see the long dark in better shape haha. I dont play many video games...really only TLD and some other indie stuff with low requirements.

I play under linux. To be honest, 99% of the time the amount of futzing around after you get the system set up properly is quite minimal; I have a nice collection of windows only games in steam that I run using proton with no trouble at all. There are other ones that don't work so great (Crysis, which I'm trying to get going now because reasons) but generally the experience is pretty good. If you do decide to install TLD into linux using steam, tell steam to use the latest proton as a compatibility tool; you'll get much better results that way. As an aside, while I run TLD windows binaries, I run the KSP linux binaries because they're using a non-bugged version of unity for their game.

That said, I do love to tinker so that works a lot for me but it may not work for you.

If you do decide to build a linux gaming system, go AMD. Seriously.

7 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

So, in short, everyone .... if you want a well balanced system that will blow you away for reasonable pricing and last at least one console generation..... buy @stratvox's PC - and at worst replace the GPU in 2 years if you feel like having (actual) ray tracing when it (actually) becomes relevant. Everything else is good for at least half a decade. If you have to cut corners ... cut with one of the NVMe drives, but personally I feel at least a PCIe Gen 3 SSD will become mandatory fast, and if you really have to save money, cut down the CPU, but no less than the 3700X, as everything below 8 cores will also become old real quick. Maybe wait for the B550 Motherboards if you want to save a buck, but don't miss out on PCIe 4.

Thanks for the kind words

Though chances are pretty good that I'm going to replace the video card with big navi when it comes out if, as its rumoured to do, it supports the Khronos vulkan/Microsoft dx12+ raytracing extensions with good performance. TLD is a game that would benefit insanely well from good raytracing; its lighting effects are already incredibly well-managed; I can just imagine how good it would look with raytracing. Like I said above, I hope the quiet from the developers is because they're moving to a newer version of unity that hopefully will support raytracing as raytracing starts to move into the consumer market.

And as a side note, I remember when I first learned what ray tracing was and how it worked; that was way back in the nineties in the Quake/Descent era. Seeing real time raytracing arrive 25 years later is something I anticipate with glee.