stratvox

20 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

Also if you are so inclined feel free to report to our Help Desk directly: hinterlandgames.com/support

I have done so... took me a while to get a video chopped down enough to be able to upload it to that page . I think I uploaded that one a week or three back.

I have heard back from some of your folks on some of the bugs I've reported, but not this one; I'm hoping that it'll be at least investigated before the next release comes out.

I'm also unsure that's it's not driver related; I'm strongly considering laying hands on an AMD RX5700XT next week (gonna eat up all my points at my local retailer for that one) so I can tease out the extent to which it's game/engine driven vs. gpu/driver driven. My experiments with using Vulkan vs OpenGL on this nvidia card seem to indicate it may well be driver related; if I end up pulling the trigger next week I'll post here and let people know.

This is all linux-driven and as such I'm sure only affects a small subset of your players; probably smaller even then the hardcore interloper/deadman crowd. Still, as I really like this game and your studio and want to see it (and you!) do well and also try to help make linux gaming a viable alternative to Windows gaming I'm hoping to kill two birds with one stone... I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this.

Just re-upping this thread. Having visited a few more maps I can definitely say that the most recent update (1.55) has resulted in a LOT more terrain z-fighting than used to be the case.

@Raphael van Lierop @Support I want to make sure you're aware of this; right now it's making playing the game actively fatiguing because of how much flickering one gets on the screen. If you lack linux testing harnesses I can possibly help you out with that.

On 5/29/2019 at 8:03 AM, jeffpeng said:

Not sure if waiting is a good idea or not. On one hand with Navi looking to be not totally sh*t maybe waiting a month or two is worth the wait, on the other hand you can get some Vega 56's for 250ish bucks right now, and the drivers are tested and true.

I'm figuring on waiting for another week or three as today's Ryzen and Navi releases should result in price cuts on older parts... at which point I'll think about either grabbing whatever's best from the newly outdated or dropping the dough on the 5700XT. The point of getting the 5700XT would be to eventually get a new ryzen machine sans video card and put the nvidia back in this one and get a full AMD stack gaming machine.

In my day job we're developing a grid architecture distributed supercomputer for scientific research; you can find our open beta at https://portal.distributed.computer. When I get around to having this machine become a spare I'll just turn it into a machine that works on the distributed computer and stick it in a corner somewhere. Once we get the standalone linux worker going and I can run it at idle priority and headless I'll probably stick a new NIC in this one, attach it to a wireless access point running in infrastructure mode and replace my very old wireless router gateway and get a far more powerful firewall/gateway setup for the home network here that also crunches on scientific research projects for fun and profit.

Happily I've been running high volume transaction services on the internet for years (solaris and ubuntu/centos/debian linux have been the main platforms I've worked in) so I feel pretty comfortable about running a secure ship here.

To return to the main point... please Hinterland investigate the z-fighting issues, and if you're having a hard time getting a good system up and running to test linux builds I'd be happy to lend a hand.

One thing's for sure... real pack predatory behaviour on the part of wolves will profoundly change the balance of terror in all experience modes outside of pilgrim. If they get it right wolves will change from an "oh look, you're bringing me snacks" to "oh sugar I gotta get out of here".

Yeah, my long run is not interloper. On the gripping hand he just had his second long dark birthday (i.e. made it to day 730); the reason he's got all that is because he's basically been /everywhere/. 

Interloper is more fun than stalker just because it doesn't have as many wolves. I think worrying stalker will turn into an FPS with wolves is kinda like bolting that barn door.

10 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Maybe my biggest Problem with this is that I've been stuck in my Interloper mindset too long. I like the idea that the player is far from the apex predator, but actually has to outsmart their opponent in order to overcome it, and very carefull chose their moment.

That's why I said "AN apex predator", not "THE apex predator". Once you get weapons (rifle, bow) you become one of the predators... but not the only one, and of course one way of handling being one of the apex predators is by taking care of the competition... and that goes just as much for your peers (wolves) as it does for you.

Also, think about how nutso it will be if there are four or five wolves on a map that will come after you when you're spotted on interloper: it's gonna get tight.

On 7/6/2019 at 11:53 AM, Screenshot Pilgrim said:

 I spooked a bear, playing with custom passive/diminishing settings.  It eventually calmed down, but agitated sounds kept on until I vacated the area. 

I experienced that this very morning.

On 7/2/2019 at 10:19 PM, Martin Prchal said:

Today I noticed something weird. I was going from Milton to Mystery Lake in the little canyon with the waterfalls. Really close to the cave to Mystery Lake, I noticed a pretty little view to the left side that I had never noticed before, even I have gone this route before. Was this always here?

On 7/2/2019 at 10:23 PM, ajb1978 said:

Yup.  That's where Will gives his final adieu to his father's plane, in Story Mode.

I disagree. That's on the other side of the collapsed tunnel with the penitentiary bus. 

I've wondered if you can get down there by goating down from where the plane is crashed. May try sometime to see....

A grey and lavender mid-morning, humid and raw.

My long run guy is basically a tank. Balaclava, Rabbit Hat, Moose Satchel, ear wrap, Moose Hide Cloak, Bear Coat, Two Cowichan sweaters, Snow Pants inside Deer Pants, two woolen long johns, two climbing socks, Deer Boots.

When fully repaired even blizzards become manageable. Not that you want to stay outside, but you've got a lot more time to find shelter, that's for sure.

You don't get to see snow and the aurora at the same time every night:

What the? The sun is shining, the sky is blue? Where the hell is this snow coming from?

The blizzard that's about to force me into the barn:

3 minutes ago, stratvox said:

If you're cornered by a pack, the revolver starts looking really really good... and I can see how those scenarios could result in eating a LOT of bullets... esp. if they've considered how much has to happen to deter the pack, as well as any individual timberwolf.

I'd like to add that the plenty of ammo may be about ensuring a player can arm themselves quickly because they don't have to go far from anywhere to find ammunition. Smart timberwolves in all the major regions could profoundly change esp. the stalker experience.

....as for the bigger picture

I don't know. If the timberwolves really do work together as an effective hunting pack it may be that you'll want its fast firing. The ideal behaviour for a pack of wolves would be something like this:

• The entire pack is pretty evenly spread over the region that are accessible to it (i.e two packs in TWM one south one north).
• When a timberwolf identifies quarry, they bark to alert the other wolves.
• The other wolves start moving towards the bark.
• The alerter starts following the player at a distance. Periodically they bark to alert the pack to the new location.
• When enough of them arrive they attack. Say, minimum four? Other wolves will join in as they arrive.
• They attack in a coordinated manner to bring you down. If you get to this stage  you are in big big trouble.

How to avoid the pack attack? If you're armed, kill the alerter wolf immediately and make tracks so you're not there when the rest of the pack starts showing up... or if you've got a good position to rain death from wait for them to kill as many of them as possible.

If you're cornered by a pack, the revolver starts looking really really good... and I can see how those scenarios could result in eating a LOT of bullets... esp. if they've considered how much has to happen to deter the pack, as well as any individual timberwolf.

If you're talking stalker (aka "wolf city") it makes it more stalkerish... way more stalkerish. I mean, stalker is all about the wolves (which is why I don't really play it) and something like what I've outlined above will significantly add to the challenge of the maps that get timberwolves. 

Also, think about it... you're cruising through somewhere in the early evening out in the fields and you pick up a timberwolf alert (you hear the alert barks from nearby). It's keeping its distance, and you need to shut it up and get away from it. If you're weaponless, you need to get away and hopefully indoors post haste. Imagine, you're run-walking to get away and you keep hearing the patter of their paws and the yips they're using to tell their buddies where you are. That'll be an amazing tension builder.

You have a revolver. You finally spot the alerting wolf and turn the hunter into the hunted. If you get in there and hit them they run away whimpering. It's time to get a move on and hope you can avoid the wolves coming to look for their friend. Still lots of tension.

I'm intrigued because I really want to see better behaviour from the wildlife... and because one thing that would really help the late game be more interesting is to have the player as an apex predator in an (undoubtedly vastly oversimplified) ecosystem.

Another question I have is... will the wolves we've come to know and ... well, love  o.O... still be there? How will they interact with the timberwolves? How about the timberwolves with the deer? If the pack goes after herds of deer using the technique I've outlined above, it won't be long before they hunt them to extinction... or that the deer will have to have an insanely high respawn rate to keep up. Testing the interaction of all the animal mechanics must be insane.

Overall, I'll end this by saying that we've seen major overhauls and interesting buffs already (birch bark, well fed, etc) and they've handled them incredibly well from a gameplay perspective, so I've got a lot of patience to see what happens when Ep. 3 comes out and timberwolves (hopefully! oplease oplease) get introduced into sandbox. They've (i.e. Hinterland and Raph) have earned a lot of trust from me when it comes to not fscking up the game.

On 7/3/2019 at 11:19 AM, UpUpAway95 said:

If a player wants to just use the pistol and not use a rifle or a bow, that's a choice they should be able to make... not encumbered by your sensibilities over there being some ammo lying around in the world.

Revolver/Bow looks like a great road combo. Total mass of weapons is half that of the rifle. 

He's pining for the fjords.

Some Winding River randos:

This was good mapping weather. Looking up the river towards the dam.

This was later when I was ferrying stuff from ML to PV. The weather adds just a touch of melancholy.

I was in WR for three days. One of them started with a pea soup fog; a little later on it burned off so I went up to the dam to pick stuff up.

As I moved my stuff through the cave to PV, I had occasion to hunker down in the cave and make some water and cook up some venison. It was my last trip through the cave. I stopped to look back at the cooking fire, which would burn down soon:

It's not realistic for winter to never end. It's not realistic that bears can't climb trees. It's not realistic that predators glow green and become super dangerous when there's an aurora. It's not realistic that you can fix a sprain in moments with a bandage and some acetaminophen. It's not realistic that you only get ~10kg of meat from a deer, or only ~30kg from a bear or moose; those animals both weigh well over a quarter ton when fully grown. It's not realistic that there are only bucks, not does.

If death is the only guarantee, why bother? I mean, it's not like real life has a hundred percent mortality rate, now does it?

It's a finite play, but that finite number can be very long; there's a guy who's had a run that lasted over ten years in game.

4 hours ago, tulkawen said:

Thank you.

Is this streaming online at the same time as playing like Twitch?

You can either stream to twitch or youtube, record to hard drive, or do both.

There's a learning curve, but I can say once you get over that curve it works very well.

If you're interested in recording you playing, I'd suggest OBS and a multi-core CPU. You probably already have the multi-core CPU I figure, so... check out OBS: http://obsproject.com.

Aye, it's not ready for prime time yet. Interestingly, I just got a download for my two unity games from steam consisting of "pre-cached shaders: opengl vulkan" so I'm thinking things might be seeing rapid improvement....

Getting ready to leave this place:

I've been on FM for nearly two months, mapping out the region completely. Here is the result:

The only two regions I have left that don't look like this are Winding River and Pleasant Valley. This particular guy has been wandering Great Bear now for ~690 days. My current plan (I'm now at the Camp Office) is to continue on up through the dam to Winding River and mapping that region, and then going to PV and mapping all of that region as well. I expect that by the time I'm done I'll have eaten another couple of months, and at that point I'm taking the rest of my saplings and heading up to TWM for a while.

Yeah, that flickering is exactly what we're talking about. On nVidia it's really blatant. If you want to use the command line option -force-vulkan (which may work much better on amd than nvidia; while the z-fighting goes away any shadows closer to you than maybe twenty metres or so will make you think Will/Astrid ate some mouldy rye bread) you'd edit the batch file to include it. Or, you can switch into whichever folder that the game got installed into in a terminal and try issuing "./TLD.x86_64 -force-vulkan"

As far as I know, there isn't. however, there are ways around most of them. However, the wires in the long corridor between the upper dam entrance and the turbine room are not possible to work around. If an aurora comes while you're in the dam, you're on one side of those wires or the other and that's where you will remain until it's over. Another set of wires that are impassable are in the Lower Dam at the bottom of the stairs that start take you upwards again to where you entrance to the dam from the Winding River side. You're on one side or the other of those wires when the aurora starts and you'll stay there or you'll be dead.

Yeah, it's dangerous in there. Heh, I remember when I first got the game I laid out my bedroll in the corridor of death in the dam, not realising that if an aurora came out there'd be electricity. I was just a-sleepin' away and then there's this "brrrzp" and I'd died of burns. I was like "what the hell...?"

On 6/9/2019 at 4:36 AM, peteloud said:

ajb1978,

". . . I crouch before doing any time-accelerated action,  . . ."

What a good, simple idea.  I had never thought of that. From now on I shall try and remember to crouch when I harvest a carcass. 

 

. . . That has given me another thought about butchering a carcass - perhaps I should drop all cooked meat and fresh pelts a distance away to reduce the scent I give off.

If I have that kind of stuff and I'm going to do a time accelerated action (typically either carcass harvesting or chopping up a limb) I always drop. You don't need to drop it a distance away... as soon as it hits the ground no predator can pick it up.