stratvox

9 hours ago, TheRealNFK said:

Aurora over the Muskeg, as I adapt to cave living.

I know the cave you're standing in front of!

You might find the next cave to the west to be better... reasonably central between Spence's and the hunting grounds just to the east of where you're standing and up on the Muskeg Overlook.

YMMV, of course

Once you start to get into the good clothing, cave living is the bomb. It turns out that one fire is plenty to be able to cook your food on, and the huge advantages of being able to run a permafire (hey, torches on demand!) just can't be beat, imho. You can cure your stuff in the back, and while some caves are remote from worktables, there are plenty that are not. Even if you're on an extensive stay in someplace like HRV, just so long as you go in with lots of arrows you can stay for a very long time in any of the caves up in there. I'm very partial to the waterfall cave up on Monolith lake, the cave that's near an ice cave entrance up in the north west corner of the map. Both have plenty of wood nearby and good hunting. Monolith gets moose and the cave near the ice cave gets a bear; if you can ping pong back and forth while getting deer and wolves on the side you can live extremely well for a long time. 

My long run guy spent a lot of time in HRV, heading out to the trailer in MT to use the worktable to make arrows every few weeks. Once you're past the early game and settling in to just live for a while HRV can be a very nice place to do it. The amount of natural resources in there is incredible.

It's a fire that you keep feeding so that it lasts for days. This is something you do in outdoor environments that are protected from the wind, like caves. You need a fire to sleep in them through the night, so you build one in the entrance way and lay out your bedroll next to it after you feed it up to twelve hours. When you awake, the outdoor cold fire bonus will mean you'll still have hours left; feed it back up to twelve and head out for the day. Go collect your wood and do any hunting that may need to be done than return. Feed that fire back up again to twelve hours, start doing any cooking, crafting, repair, and watermaking you may need to get going on. When you're ready for bed, feed it up to twelve again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This cuts way down on the match consumption, a finite resource, by using gathered wood, an infinite resource. Also, your fire will rapidly find itself at its max temperature (80C) and if you get cold you can always roll back to the cave and with a roaring hot fire you'll warm up very quickly so you can continue your day as once you get within a few meters of it you'll get three up arrows and will warm up in very good time, giving you more time to head back out and do more of whatever it is that needs doing.

It's a crucial technique and works extremely well; so well that I rarely put bases in buildings any more (Trapper's is an honourable exception). The cold bonus will cut way way down on the amount of wood you need to keep it going, and always having a fire available will be a life-saver on a routine basis.

I think you could make a decent case that The Long Dark is a very Canadian version of purgatory.

My thinking has been a wood fired steam electricity generator, and that old man Barker bought it from Carter Hydro as a backup unit for power at the farm.

The interesting thing about a wood fired steam engine is that it should be usable after the First Flare, even if the actual dynamo that produces electricity is fried.

On the gripping hand it also looks extremely old and reasonably well corroded; I'm not sure I'd want to bring that boiler up to pressure if I was anywhere within a few hundred yards of the thing in case it blew.

If you quarter a carcass with an arrow in it, you will destroy the arrows, heads and all.

Found that the hard way with a bear full of arrows and night coming on. I quartered the bear so I could grab hide and guts and hike back to mountaineer's, but I discovered that when you quarter an animal all of the arrows in it disappear. Cost me like six arrows.

I never did that again.

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

building my own crystal radio set powered by nothing but air.

I did that too. Good times. Don't feel old... yet

If you're going to bring in Radio Shack, bring in the old one where you could buy actual electronics components. I want to find some resistors and caps!

I actually use the crouch toggle to roleplay sitting all the time, not just when cooking or sitting next to a fire.

It'd be nice (but not strictly speaking necessary) have a an actual "sit" toggle that allowed the user to drop their at rest calorie consumption by some marginal quantity (say from 120 to 110 or whatever), with the need to get up again before doing anything... which may from time to time end up creating problems for the player.

This is also because I will often not use the pass time function; I've had many occasions playing this game where the player is huddled next to a fire in the mouth of a cave watching a blizzard blow by and just letting the time pass while I make a coffee or a snack or do some tidying or whatever, with the occasional look over to see if the situation needs maintaining (wood on the fire, drink some water, that sort of thing).

I dunno. For me, if you lose your well fed while at 3% condition it doesn't seem unreasonable that the player fades into the long dark instantly. I mean, sure it sucks, but there's plenty of situations of suck that can happen in this game... it's part of its charm!

On 8/17/2019 at 1:16 PM, Treefall said:

+1 to Aurora waking, I’d love to see a hit to rest from waking to it, because electronics interrupting sleep. It’d be cool if we could demo the various electrical objects to create a “safer” sleep zone, but I think the aurora should be so disruptive, you “awake with strange sensation” no matter what. Kind like a blizzard for sleep. I think it would be thematic for it to be DIFFICULT to sleep thru the aurora, even if you want/need to. Unless you have tea, or are very tired, I think it should keep you awake.

Could be an interesting buff for herbal tea; aurora's on and you need to sleep? Have a cup of herbal tea to get your rest, and even have it be enhanced. 

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.

9 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

Not so surprising  considering in those days they didn't use shielded wiring so electrical conductivity thru  induction would a common occurrence.  But as far as the car's shielded electronics becoming electrified by induction via Aurora?  That's gotta be a lot of power, huh?

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.

13 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Yeah that is probably as close to it as it gets 😉

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.

1 hour ago, Admin said:

The Long Dark is compatible with all major modern video cards supported by a user's OS. Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL.

If you find that you are having issues running The Long Dark on a video card supported by Unity and OpenGL please contact our Support Team at thelongdark.com/support.

Thank you.

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.

9 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I must admit I'm sort of upset that the game is apparently broken for an entire platform for months now, and there is no fix and no real official commentary on this.

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.