stratvox

Well, I can see how a greater variety of hide clothing could be all right, and doesn't have to make stuff easier; instead I'd be interested in seeing a greater variety of hides being able to be used for different items (i.e. deer, wolf, bear, moose coats, with different weight/temperature/wind/encumbrance characteristics, like a new deer coat that is relatively light and doesn't encumber very much but is only +2C for warmth etc, perhaps coupled with a greater variety of daytime temps). The idea here is that you can wake up to a relatively warm morning and take a risk of wearing less clothing while doing a task outside such as ferrying that moose meat back to base, but if you get boned by a blizzard showing up you can get into far more serious trouble.

The trick is to make it about tradeoffs like I can carry more per trip but if a wolf comes along or a blizzard blows up it can become far more dangerous for me. The tradeoff is by cutting down on the number of trips I'm also cutting my risk of bad situations, but making the outcome of a bad situation happening worse, if you follow my reasoning on it.

What quality setting is the machine running on? Have you tried playing with the quality options? It may be that there's a particular feature that's enabled in the new Mac version (which features an entirely new version of the unity engine the game's built on) that happens to punch the video hardware in that particular model hard.

19 hours ago, xanna said:

This one as well! I didn't really clock it before, but look at those rays of sunlight! Phenomenal.

There are are mods on; I'm going to guess that's where the god rays came from; I've never seen them in this game before either.

I do hope that some more lighting effects will be coming; as Raph said in the intro video to TFTFT, they're planning on adding some graphics enhancements for the people with high powered video hardware.

I happen to have some high powered video hardware right here, and I'm looking forward to it. While messing with the look of this game is perilous (I personally think the visual style of the game is both beautiful and unique and have loved it since I discovered this game), I'm confident that the Hinterland folks will do spectacular work when they get to it.

Since the dlc dropped I've just been hanging out in Forsaken Airfield.

I've been in there for a hundred and sixty three days. You can pretty much live here indefinitely, and I'm guessing that part of the plan is to have a mill and ammo bench in the open pit mine region, at which point you can stay up in the far territories basically completely independently from the area around the southern tip of the island.

Anyway. 

Here's some shots from the Mindful Cabin. The first is an early early morning view off the porch towards the Final Approach with both the airfield and the island cabin (barely) visible. You can see right across the map to the cliffs along the far edge, with an early morning haze caused by light being scattered by tiny ice crystals in the air.

This next one is looking off the same point at night. You can see the airport and island cabin here too, though obviously you can't really see the cliffs at the far edge, but ... well, it's pretty.

I of course return to Junker's routinely to use the worktable there. There the night sky can become eldritch with the oak trees twisting against the night lights.

I think that last one could be a good choice for wallpaper.

Yeah, my feeling from what I've seen is that fixing the mac version ended up eating a lot of resources, esp developer time. As the note released last week said, they've ported it to a new version of the runtime (er, unity runtime that is), now uses metal (I have some knowledge of what goes into that; my firm is trying to get the webgpu project up and running across dx12, metal, and opengl/vulkan for use in ad hoc scientific computation networks; I will only say that this shizznit is far from trivial), AND is now available on the M1 and M2 arches, which by itself is a major deal; supporting new hardware architectures is never a minor task. I suspect there was a lot of work comms going between Unity and Hinterland for this, and we may all end up getting some benefit from this as I suspect the next major release (i.e. March 30th with a new region etc) will bring all the other platforms up to a more recent revision of unity and hopefully will help fix some of the issues that we've seen many people talking about here with the Forsaken Airfield release, such as wind noise. 

As was said in the release: 

Quote

The current target date for Xbox and PlayStation releases of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY is Wednesday, March 15th. This will bring Steam, Epic Game store, Xbox, and PlayStation versions to parity. Please keep in mind, Xbox and PlayStation will need to approve these new versions, which may affect the release date. We will provide confirmation closer to launch. 

As everyone knows console store approval is an ongoing thing; I'm happy to see Hinterland being clear about what this means. The important detail is "versions to parity", which hopefully will mean that we're not going to see a two to three month delay for the console versions after this as TFTFT progresses for the rest of this year.

Another important little detail (at least to my software industry hindbrain) was this paragraph: 

Quote

We are currently targeting a launch for TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, PART TWO on Thursday, March 30th. This will be for the Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Epic Games Store versions. The work on Part Two is nearly complete, and will be entering the Testing phase soon. Please keep in mind that the release date may be impacted by development realities.

Seems to confirm the idea that they're hoping to be able to release at least nearly simultaneously across all supported platforms going forward, and that they're hoping to be able to recover the time lost to dealing with the mac port issues going forward. It's pretty clear that they've got a platform team as well as an actual game dev team, and now that the platform work is more able to go into maintenance mode rather than active dev mode that they're expecting testing (which was almost certainly waiting for the completion of the mac support; not much point in running test suites when you get to run them all over again later), they'll be able to pour a lot more into the game development itself and get that action out the door.

Speaking for myself, I hope it's smooth sailing for them; it looks like they've spent a lot of time and resources into paying down technical debt and are ready to proceed with enlarging the game.

ETA: If in fact @Raphael van Lierop got the resource allocation so correct between the platform and game teams that they're able to both wrap up the mac and console platforms and pivot the devs to game resources to be able to put the final spit and polish on the next release a couple of weeks afterwards, that speaks quite highly of his organisational ability.

On 1/28/2023 at 12:48 PM, The Riddler said:

Windows 10, Nvidia.

So, not a platform/video specific issue then. That's good to know, means I can stop investigating my own system for a cause.

23 hours ago, The Riddler said:

I’ve seen this too, and reported to to the support portal. Are you running this on Linux? Or using a Navi radeon card?

On 1/16/2023 at 12:56 PM, DerEineVonDamals said:

Hi,

I could also contribute something here;
A dead deer in the rock, from Mountain Town.

 

 

I think it used to be open and to have a rope climb down from the pond up there to behind the Grey Lady's house, and the rock was put there to cover it up and close it off when they reworked the region for story mode redux. I bet they forgot to pull the deer out of the loot tables so it spawns in there from time to time, never to be liberated from its earthly coils.

I call that path that goes from  south of the airfield hangar up over the top of that ridge the high path. It's too bad there's no cave up there, it'd be all right to be able to pass a night on the high path when necessary; the first time I found that path (from the airfield side) it went to an evening glimmer fog while I was way up there and it was pretty intense.

22 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

looks like the images have failed to load these last couple of posts @stratvox

Weird, they're loading for me: 

2 hours ago, Paddyjack said:

Could be that it was the original intention however in the game there is a tombstone with Ryan Thompson at that location: 

And yet, the town's called Thomson's Crossing, sans P... just like the painter.

Just call me necro man, I guess. Saw this one and thought I'd post:

1915 Burnt Land at Sunset

I dunno man, maybe try swiping in the other direction?

Stratvox flees....

I know it's been a while, but I found another one. 

1916 Ice Reflections

From the Tom Thomson memorial twitter feed 

I'm getting intermittent crashes to desktop. It seems to be related to number of sources of light, but isn't really predictable. I've also noticed that when I've played for a long time (amount of time is variable, though) that the frame rate becomes very poor; the fix is to completely exit and restart the game.

I've submitted a bug for both the degraded performance and the crashing to desktop along with Player.logs of the time the crashes occurred. Playing on linux on an all-AMD system. Are any other linux players experiencing intermittent crashes or performance problems?

1 hour ago, hozz1235 said:

This was really noticeable in the new areas - seemed that only about half of the location names showed on the map.

Yes, I've noticed this too, seems to be a change in praxis. Wondering if it'll change back to more "normal" behaviour on the future....

I view the actual Airport as a place to go to do certain things. I've actually been doing my worktable stuff at Junker's rather than in the airport. I've had insomnia a few times now because I've spent the vast majority of my time a long way away from it. The basement being the only place to avoid glimmer fog means ... I don't try to avoid glimmer fog, I just take the insomnia. It's not a very harsh affliction, has almost zero affect basically, so other than it hampering condition recovery somewhat it might as well not be there. That, of course, may not be so good when I return to my personal custom setup, but right now I'm playing Voyageur because I need to get the stim plus blizzard badges (esp blizzard badge because the wind thing sounds pretty sweet) so I'm playing one of the built-in difficulties. The reason for that is the only condition recovery in my preferred custom is low recovery while sleeping; in this context insomnia could turn into a real problem.

The airport, though... good place to visit if I need to make something, and totally worth looting because there's TONS of stuff there, but ... not a place to live. The hunting close by is not really that good; there are other places on the map with much better hunting, and the size of the place (FA should stand for Freakin' Astronormous) means that it really takes too long to travel from the airport to where the good hunting is and back again; there are other places to live closer by.

Brittle Cave is a better base than Island Cabin, imho. The key for long term living in FA are the bears; both Island and Mindful are within striking distance of the two bears on the map, but so is Brittle Cave of the bear that lives under the big pile of rocks close to the downed helicopter that's not Final Approach; and there's better hunting around Brittle Cave than there is around Island Cabin. The one fishing cabin is also close to it. There's also a cave close to Justy's Hovel (Rusty Shovel? ) which looks like a good possibility, but I've not yet spent the time in it to know if the hunting near it is any good. The paucity of caves on the other side of the map near Mindful make living on that side of the map a lot dodgier imho, as caves generally make better dwellings than cabin, esp. cabins that only have potbelly stoves with their sole cooking surfaces. I have some more exploring to do around there... there's the flash flood cave but it's a little remote from the hunting compared to Brittle on the other side of the lake. I'm hoping I may have yet to find another cave on the Mindful side of the map that will be nice and close to the herds of deer that congregate in the wooded area near the foot of the cliff over there.

It's kind of too bad that there are no caves anywhere on the high pass... pretty much no good shelter at all up there.

Snow that accumulates, and drifts. I actually looked into this with an eye to trying to create a mod, but ... holy mackerel the math involved is truly out of this world. That said, I'm far from an expert and I'm sure there are people out there that could do a bang up job.

Rock climbing. I think rock climbing is a natural evolution for this game. Controller mechanisms would need some real thought. I've had some, including some that are "true" to the kind of interesting way locomotion is done in the game now. Given the game's setting (Canada's Western Cordillera archipelago off the coast of BC) rock climbing seems like a natural way to extend the game into new areas of game play. However, it's a challenging thing to think about given that you have to come up with control schemes that would work with keyboard & mouse as well as with console controllers. Done properly though and given the game's setting and beautiful art style I could see scaling the cliffs in AC or HRV as being a truly excellent addition to how we all get around.

I also think that it would be really great if the wildlife in the game functioned like a true ecosystem, even if a greatly simplified one. However, doing the animation and pathing for the animals in this scenario would be truly truly challenging, let alone dealing with actually simulating an ecosystem, though all the elements in the game are pretty much there in the region maps already.

Anyway, I've said all of these things before, and more besides. Even so, as it stands this is a great game, and I think it would be very cool for it to get wider exposure, not least because of the truly unique emotional headspace that it evokes in the player.

I too have noticed this, and I think I reported it to their bug tool, but glad to see others have as well. Also been having fun taking debug screenshots of missing textures in the new region

Aye, it's hard to know how it will play out. Either way is all right, if it's day 200 and I'm heading into the pit mine, and all the food's ruined, I'm not exactly going to be surprised and angry... even if it hasn't worked that way in the past. After all, as has been said, there's been a major reworking around loot and that may well include around how decay works on loot.

or any of the other winter solstice holidays that suit your tradition.

Thanks to the folks a Hinterland for putting out this wonderful diversion that keeps us in the winter spirit all year 'round!

All the best for the coming year!

He is. I believe he lost both his password to that account, and the email address it was registered under, so he couldn't recover it.

There are a couple of locations where the wind really shrieks because of stone passages they pass through. I've noticed that they're not always on; I think the wind actually has to be coming from the right direction to make them howl like that, but yeah, it's really loud in those places.

Poe, ERB, H.G. Wells, and a growing amount of Lovecraft is public domain, and they both have lots of stuff that'd be in the right size range to be practical to read while sitting next to a fire in a cave while a blizzard blows outside.

Finding a copy of Paradise Lost in the Gray Lady's house in Milton would also be quite cool given the obvious echoes to it in Episode Two. Tom Thomson's paintings are all public domain now, I believe, so finding a "print" of Birches in the attic of the Barn in PV would be pretty damned cool imho, esp. given that you can basically go up that rise opposite the road from the barn and look right at it.

There is a lot of scope to run this kind of stuff as little easter eggs throughout the game. It's not actually possible because it's not public domain, but I always thought it made more sense to hear Gould playing that piano piece on the radio during an aurora. The Idea of North could be another good choice by Gould. And something like a flickering display of "La Paysagiste" by Jacques Drouin from the NFB on a TV during an aurora (mebbe a big ol' curve front console TV from the 70s in the PV Farmhouse) would be super all right to come across. 

Yeah. Obvs I can't really know. but it's entirely possible this will be destined to be fixed down the line. Software dev is balancing dev time, reward, plus of course the question of what's viable on which hardware. They could maybe fix it for people with latest gen video cards, but the majority of the userbase is almost certainly still running gtx1060 era cards, and a lot of the time keeping the game viable on older hardware (and consoles!) means making hard decisions.