stratvox

The sun is quite capable of making a big nuke over Kansas look like a firecracker. ETA: read the number of amps induced in the 570 km telephone wire in the K Series article: 1500-3400 amps were measured at different points along the wire before the whole thing melted (that's what "was fused" means)... and that wasn't actually that big of a bomb. That's significantly more than enough current to move an elevator, and don't forget Winding River has wires running all along it that connect to the dam and who knows how much further after you leave the river to go to PV.

Insulation won't do anything in this case. The only way for a seriously massive solar storm to not affect a wire would be if it was in a Faraday cage (i.e. surrounded by a net of wires that are grounded). This is because it's not about the atmosphere getting ionized; it's about the large number of charged particles and magnetic flux inducing current in long wires. Oh, and while the 1859 event was big, it's become very clear to scientists that while it was big relative to baseline, the sun could in fact hammer the earth much harder than that one did. In the real world, there'd be one event like that followed by centuries to millennia of calm. I sort of head canon this by having a few things happen simultaneously: magnetic pole flip greatly weakening the Earth's protection from the solar wind coupled with the Earth being hit by a CME from the sun flattening out the magnetic field even further; during the time it takes for the pole flip to complete solar events would be greatly magnified so normal solar activity such as aurorae get greatly magnified.

Needs a laugh upvote emoji thing.

@jeffpeng My read is that this is a Unity issue, and that Hinterland has opened up a ticket ("Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL"). It may very well be that all they can do is wait for Unity to fix it, and can't really say anything about it, given they are a Unity partner.

If you read up the thread, you'll see that that happened about a month or so ago. Receipt was acknowledged in early July. I'm guessing that this message means that the issue has been passed along to the folks at Unity?

I'm very much looking forward to driver improvements on this. I'm considering doing a rebuild of my system with a distro more appropriate for getting into the bleeding edge versions of the drivers, because I personally suspect that it'll be a while before AMD gets around to updating the proprietary driver, and it'll be a while before ubuntu gets around to getting a good driver stack going on their distro. Any recommendations?

I got ambitious and ran some of the phoronix benches. Holy crap this card is fast.

Yeah, I hear you on that. OTOH, I also wonder if it's been reported by anyone other than me... I personally suspect that the number of active long-term linux users might be... two. I personally didn't report it to the support portal right away; between their response to me and their response in this thread I think it's reasonable to say that they've been aware of it for about a month. In fact, they upgraded the version of unity they were using at the time that the problem showed up IIRC, so it may be that there's a coding change that needs to happen to properly deal with this while using OpenGL using the new(er) version of unity... and given that I think testing is outsourced, it may be that their vendor is the one that dropped the ball on this. At any rate they're aware of it now; I hope they fix it soon because it's quite annoying. @Admin @Raphael van Lierop I've got lots of time working in the IT industry, albeit not in gaming, including as a tester (mostly in telecom, email, and in distributed computing), so if you're interested I'm happy to try out various test/debug builds for you if that'll help because this is by far my fave game and I'd like to see this fixed. On a more general note, the radeon vulkan support does still have the shadow issue in the game (shadows on drugs!), while the opengl backend still has the flickering. I think the vulkan shadow issue is something that only happens under certain circumstances so it's not always immediately obvious when you fire it up. As for the new radeon, it's obviously significantly more powerful than my old card, but it's patchy; some things are *much* faster, while other things not so much. I suspect that as driver maturity improves so will my results.

@jeffpeng Well, I did it. I bought the 5700xt. Results are that Vulkan performance is improved but still pretty bad. The shadows work fine (unlike while using vulkan under nvidia) but the frame rate kinda sucks. The flickering is just as bad using the opengl backend as it is under nvidia, which really sucks. Maybe when the next version of mesa comes out that'll improve. I'm also wondering if this is a mesa issue, a unity issue, or an issue with this game in particular; it's very hard to say, but at this point I think we can say it's not an nvidia issue. Overall the card is performing reasonably well. I'm using the proprietary stack from AMD because I'm going to have to do some serious surgery to get the latest'n'greatest from the open source drivers; running the one that's available on oibaf just dumps me into a default vesa desktop at 1024x768, which is absolutely unacceptable. I'm doing research right now to figure out what'll be involved in doing that, but info is scanty....

But yeah, I've seen that. There've been some serious problems with weird stuff like this (as well as arrows floating in mid-air) since Steadfast Ranger came out, at least on linux.

The wolf looks like it's got colon cancer or something.

I have and they don't... the light's steady. That said, ISTR Raph saying that that's not intentional so it may well go away sometime. OTOH, it may well not... Only the Shadow knows!

It's wrong, but it's really nice when you crest that hill leading from the Deadfall and see those lights gleaming out. Just wish that Trapper's had more wildlife around it in the deep game.

F10 is your friend.

Simple and Quality tools significantly speed up the crafting of arrows. This is nowhere mentioned, but if you have them in inventory when crafting arrows (not arrow shafts) you can use them to reduce crafting time by 25% and 50% respectively. I think a nice buff for those tools would be to have those tools save time at the crafting table, AND allow crafting arrows without the table, but with no time bonus from simple tools and only a 10% time bonus for quality tools. N.B.- allow crafting of arrows, not arrow shafts.

Well, you asked, so.... Americans living and working in Canada is pretty reasonably common; I don't know any that renounced their citizenship. And come back up for a visit; if you ramble through Kingston Ontario you can look me up and I'll show you where the good bars are.

Yes, sprinting is all about the fatigue, that's for sure. You can wind yourself right out in pretty short order by sprinting a lot. Heh, ditching the sprint bar etc kinda reminds me of how fatigue worked in Doom 3, where while you're on the hell levels it doesn't exist and you can run to your heart's content. Being able to endlessly sprint during an aurora could make the calorie burn of it really matter though, esp. to people who are trying to maintain the well-fed buff. I can easily see a situation where you suddenly realise you're about to hit empty on the calories and there's no food nearby so Well Fed is gonna go bye-bye. Hmmm, another interesting tuning to it: if you're starving during an aurora, you can still run but while you're sprinting your condition damage doubles from 1%/hr to 2%/hr. This is because the "on speed" effect of the aurora will allow you to run while starving but you'll be using up your body while you're doing it, albeit with no discomfort. As a side note: since they separated Pain and Sprains as afflictions, if you're wandering about with a sprained ankle and the pain wears off, the survivor should stop complaining about how much it hurts while he's walking.

Yeah, I mean, it's possible to have passage to another region right by there with the road still being closed off by a landslide.

I have some input for you, with the caveats that I'm not a US citizen, I'm a Canadian, and I Am Not A Lawyer And This Is Not Legal Advice: It's pretty much pointless to try to revoke your US citizenship as a Canadian, because our record keeping is good, and we (i.e. the Government of Canada) will share information with the US for tax purposes. This is because the US is unique in the world in taxing their citizens that reside in other countries. You can revoke your citizenship until you're blue in the face, and Uncle Sam is still going to come after you for taxes. My Mom's friend Barb holds dual citizenship, has lived here for decades, and still pays US taxes, albeit at a much lower rate than US residents do. The general process is to gain working status in Canada and a job, and then apply for landed immigrant status. That's a process that (as I understand it) generally takes a couple of years to finish. After you become a landed immigrant, you can apply to become a citizen after five years. By this time and assuming there've been no crimes or anything like that this is pretty much a formality with a low rate of denial. This process is distinct from what happens for refugees (that is people who've been accepted as asylum seekers) who have a shorter process due to their inability to return to their country of origin (otherwise they don't qualify as refugees), but I suspect it's going to be a while before Canada starts seeing the US as a place that people can seek asylum from.

Actually a really cool mechanic might be to just simply ditch fatigue as a concept once the aurora is active. You're awake, you can run without getting tired, with the only cost to running being the greater calorie consumption, but no sleep during the aurora so no condition recovery outside of drinking birch bark tea... or permit sleep but you can't recover condition from sleep during an aurora. You could counter balance the buff to fatigue by amping up the predators just a little bit more than they already are during the aurora. Could make for some interesting gameplay choices.

I have one wishlist item for sleeping, and that is to permit cancelling sleep when the aurora starts, so if you want to you can get up and experience some of the beauty. It also makes sense from the game perspective because it would just be affecting you in the same way that it affects all the other animals in the world.

In hudless mode, you get no names at all. When you pick it up, you see the little 3d revolvable model, but no name, no condition, no mass, no calorie count... nothing. That's why the visual cues are crucial; you can only see the actions you can take (take = rmb, eat = space, leave=lmb) and the model for the item. It's actually really interesting how it makes you handle what's happening... you're only cues for condition are the little sayings and sounds you get from the guy (e.g. "The guy who drank is own pee doesn't seem so crazy right now" means "you're about to start losing condition due to thirst so drink some water moron"). I think the menus could also use some re-working in hudless mode to make them more copacetic with with the hudless philosophy of how you experience the game... and it would be to take certain classes of information away from you.

I have tried playing with the HUD turned off, and in fact those kinds of cues are crucial in order to make that viable; right now if you're playing hudless you have to take it and look at it in inventory to know what the condition is because there are no cues at all when you pick it up. I'd prefer it to be the other way around; you can look at it and get a general idea of what the condition is, but even looking in inventory won't actually tell you. Turns eating things into much more of a lottery for the player... ...and I can say that playing hudless is quite cool, but the inability to get a handle on item condition that's not super precise (looking up the condition in the inventory screen) by looking at it makes hudless playing not really tenable in the long term. And that's unfortunate because, as I said, playing hudless is very cool indeed.

The problem with this is that lamp oil is a significantly better accelerant for lighting a fire than gasoline is in the real world.