stratvox

I believe the relevant quote from @Raphael van Lieropis something along the lines of "I wanted to create a moving painting that's trying to kill you" or something like that. From my POV as a Canadian who knows and sees the references in the game to Canadian paintings, I think that the art style is pitch perfect. Recognise this? That's a famous painting by Tom Thomson, arguably the most famous Canadian painter and the inspiration for the name Thomson's Crossing. Or recognise this? This painting's called The Little Indian Church, and is certainly the inspiration for St. Christopher's Church in MT. There are others, I see people like Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer in various places and overall motifs in the game; for example the mountains around ML and the various places on the coast where ice piles up is definitely strongly influenced by Harris. I say no to converting the game to realistic graphics. I love the art style. FWIW.

As a person who's been working in software (albeit in the enterprise/hpc space) being able to reproduce a problem doesn't necessarily mean you've found the problem.

Climbing towards Timberwolf on day 465ish because why not? Made camp at Deer Clearing (which on this custom game settings now has no wildlife at all) and set out to gather wood and hope to find a rabbit grove maybe.... As the sun set the night lights came out.

Succor.

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Hmmm... not sure that we really need anti-tank guns... I mean, I know the moose in particular are hard to take out, but c'mon....

That time Will came home from the bar and froze to death in the fishing hut on Crystal Lake while snoring gently at his keyboard.

I will agree, I think the animal AI could use a lot of TLC.

I know a lot of people have talked about polar bear coats, but I'm going to tell you, the setting of this game is a thousand kilometers away from where you can find polar bears. If they add polar bears I will not be happy because seeing a polar bear in the BC boreal rainforest is just going to completely destroy the suspension of disbelief. They are just not there. Ask for grizzly and kermode bears; they are found in the part of the world that the game is set in, and kermode bears (which are a subspecies of black bears and are only found in the BC rainforest) will absolutely fulfil your fashion desires; they have a creamy pale fur which is quite beautiful. Polar bears are absolutely not. You find them up on the Arctic Ocean. Basically, you don't really find polar bears anywhere you can find trees.

Well hell, what do I do now? He's gotta lotta my arrows in him, and no, I can't reach him.

Looking into the gorge. A look back to the open skies. Pushing on in.

"There is no spring, only Zuul...."

Thank you for the kind words

I made a screenie-painting of the Pillar in AC as seen from Foreman's with the aurora and the moon setting: Not exactly a screenshot, but this seemed like the sensible place to put it.

Recent trip to AC. Of course, the beauty of AC is getting to the high places and taking pics, so here are some from the High Meadow.

It is very much like that; a central inspiration is seti@home style BOINC networks but with a single language being able to be used on multiple hardware platforms: currently on the BOINC networks it's necessary to write clients for each platform you want to support. We allow a write once run anywhere with an ECMA 1.6 compatible interpreter that supports bignum, which is almost anything. We've even had a worker running on a fridge and a washing machine in the lab; they had a javascript interpreter built in because they were used to build the GUIs on the devices. I think one of the plugs we should be using is "The Distributed Computer's machine language is javascript." We have also used wasm and are developing a set of libs we're calling bifrost to allow cross code generation from commonly used languages in the scientific and math communities like python and R. I'm not super up on all the deets on how all that works; I'm the guy that keeps the machines running more than writing the software for them. If you're interested in looking at it more you can visit https://distributed.computer, https://kingsds.network, and https://portal.distributed.computer. The last in particular is where you'd set up an account and be able to run workers in web browsers to start getting tokens. We're still under very active development here but we're beginning to get some serious serious traction in both the science and biz worlds, along with some other niches, esp in health services. Of course, you can always ask me too; I can put you directly in touch with the folks doing the heavy dev on it. And yeah, if you have a modern machine and on an architecture where we can exploit the gpu we can definitely help you heat the joint.

Oh man. We're trying to figure out how to enable using graphics cards in worker systems to do (mostly) matrices and that is a massive pain. We're currently working on using webgl to enable it; it's easy for the version of our computation worker that runs in a browser but we also want to enable workers that run standalone and being able to exploit them is a challenge across the platforms. The APIs just keep proliferating. We can do Vulkan on linux and windows (and things like raspbian etc too because debian) but apple and other arm platforms are a whole 'nother world. If you're interested, the big picture is that we're creating a way to allow people to buy and sell cpu cycles for computation, with an eye on scientific simulations. We hope to bring the current price (i.e. what people pay to rent machines at azure, amazon, and google) down significantly by allowing people to turn idle systems into computation workers for an exchange in tokens, and to have markets where people can buy and sell tokens for money. Sort of like using computers to crunch numbers to create crypto, except the idea is that the number crunching will have real social and monetary value so all that cpu time won't be for nought. We're eyeing scientific applications but we are also working with the health sector and so on to enable them to turn the office machines in hospitals etc into ad-hoc compute networks to allow them to benefit from ML apps for scheduling, or for health units to do pandemic test and trace analysis, and so on. There's a lot of potental applications for this tech, including video games; I foresee it being used for MMOGs to have the players run workers on spare cores to run the online game's "ecosystem" to help make the online worlds more "realistic". One of my colleagues is the dude in charge of trying to corral all the various graphics APIs and every once in a while he just loooooses it.

Cool. I'm actually in the middle of using raspberry pis to save our firm a big pile of dough on workstations. Pretty sure that this game won't run on that one... nope. Good to hear that the prospects are good for the architecture.

Item weights are determined by gameplay value, rather than by resemblance to reality. In the early game the boost given to starting fires by the wood matches are what make them weigh more, not their weight in what we laughingly call "reality" (what is this "gainful employment" bull and why do I have to go?). It's there to make you pick a tradeoff between the weight plus the higher fire start chance. This doesn't matter so much at the lower difficulty settings but as you go up (or down, depending on your POV ) the food chain towards interloper it starts to matter a lot more.

This is a slightly unconventional view...

I'm not seeing that at all here. Running linux native version on an asus g15 (amd ryzen 5800hx + radeon rx6800m). There's a massive improvement overall with the linux version wrt video artifacting/quality with this revision. I don't remember that *particular* problem from before when running either the linux native or windows via proton version, but that may be dependent on a lot of things. For reference, I'm running ubuntu 21.10 with the kisak ppa mesa libraries and the open source radeon DRM kernel drivers.

No, not particularly. Well, I've noticed how sometimes wind and particular times of day can make for some interesting effects, but I've mostly noticed it with the grass terrain scatter. I've generally been a bow guy, and it's only lately that I've taken to carrying around the revolver because I've been spending a lot of time in BRM where it's definitely a big plus. I'll see if I can repro... I suspect that what's really going on is that the upgrade to a newer version of unity in this update brought in a bunch of engine bug fixes on the linux side. Which is not to minimise it; I can say that having helped out when pushing tools up a major revision in the back end of software that it can be a big big job making those transitions.

I am happy to be able to report that the z-fighting in the landscape has been fixed in the linux version of the game. Thank you! @jeffpeng you'll be happy to hear this!

End of a long afternoon that started at Mountaineer's and ended in the bear bag at the other end of Cinder Hills. Day 275 and I'm just entering CH for the first time; this one started in HRV and in the first week ran about collecting arrows and since then has been strictly up in the mountains, bouncing around between TWM, AC, and BRM. I'm coming down to CH because it's also known as Cloth Heaven and I'm starting to run low up in the mountains. I'm planning on returning with a few kilos of cloth in ... a few weeks? a month or two? always hard to plan the specifics in this game. After spending app. 3 months each in TWM and BRM and a month in AC, AC is definitely the tougher region for long term survival due to the paucity of wildlife compared to TWM and BRM. At any rate, the sky cleared up at dusk as I was walking the high road to the mine so I took this shot of the valley laid out before me. You can see the hall at Thompson's Crossing.

Lovely but cold cold day in Timberwolf, got a not-so-usual view of the peaks nearby and a nearly side-on view of the tail section. Got lucky with where the two bears bled out... one in the cave in echo peak west and the other up by the waterfall. What are the odds? Decided to make my way back into Black Rock Mountain, on my way up to the cave that leads there I grabbed this quick one of Echo Ravine. Here's another one I took on the way up; you can just make out the hut if you squint. Some time later, here I am at the substation in BRM. Grabbing a quick one of the early morning sun, clear and limpid but cold cold cold despite no wind to speak of. Later on I'm getting ready to climb up the back way into the Pen, looking down the river towards the power dam.