Barrett

Greatwisebob, what you said about " Life is actually hard. There don't need to be pterodactyls." gave me quite a laugh. I agree entirely, and thank you for saying it in such a succinct way. A few years ago there was a group of guys at work who were trying to get me in on their group in Arc Survival, and that comment reminded me of them. (By the way, I never thought of that game as interesting, too fantastic for my taste.) Three years ago might as well be a decade, with all thats happened, and the memories were welcome. Re-Reading my post now makes me realize I should have sat on it a while longer. There is something I should have said: "...When landscapes are viewed in this way it is easier to commit the general trend of the landscape to memory. The shape of the land becomes tamable, and shrinks into something that can be held in the mind all at once. The more empirical method of distance and direction based reckoning can them be projected on to this mental image. Changes in the slope of the ground while in route can then be just as useful a terrain feature as a hilltop or other landmark, if you are in the habit of paying attention to that sort of thing." This extra bit of information has nothing to do with the game as is, or with what the successor of TLD could be. It just needed to be said is all.

Hello. I took your survey yesterday and it must be said, I appreciate you being so direct about asking me what I am willing, and am not willing, to pay for. Thank you. I will not duplicate what was asked in that survey here beyond emphasizing that I hope that once The Long Dark is complete you focus your knowledge on making a new experience built on a more modern technological foundation. I would like to offer some feedback about what I appreciate most in your current game. Things I wish I could have said in the survey. Perhaps it may be of use to you as you move forward. Perhaps not. I invite others to use this thread to offer similar thoughts; What were you hoping you would get a chance to say when you started that survey? The Long Dark has the potential to be a game with more respect for human dignity than any other. More broadly, your game is respectful of the dignity in all things, not just humans. You’ve accomplished this by incorporating suffering and discomfort into the core mechanics of the game. The player experience is largely a quest to avoid discomfort. Also the player is actively penalized for inflicting suffering in the game; The gut shot deer that runs away hurts the player by wasting a bullet or arrow and making the meat exhausting or impossible to get. A merely injured wolf is still a threat. Through these mechanics the player is rewarded for going though the effort to kill the animal quickly and with a minimum of suffering. As an example, I find my self delaying hunting till my bow skill is leveled up some though reading and crafting. The same is true for the pistol and rifle and their skill books. And stalking close enough to get a proper point of aim is both an enjoyable challenge and a means of minimizing the suffering inflicted upon my prey. Thank you for that. Most importantly, The Long Dark never forces the player to harm another human. As you go forward, please retain that. This one choice sets your game above and beyond any other I have played. While on the subject of dignity, it would be nice to be able to do something to cover or bury the bodies that are found in the game. And while inspecting the bodies for items is logical, having the option of using them as containers afterwards should not be available. Also, the way bodies are drawn in the newer maps is much more respectful than the cookie cutter repeats found elsewhere. In Bleak Inlet and Ash Canyon each body is more or less unique and there are much less of them over all. I think it well worth the extra system resources to continue that trend going forward. If only I could cover them in stones. The other concept that I want to communicate here is more difficult to articulate. So rather than directly stating it, I am going to be a bit indirect. It is based on real world experience in hiking. So forgive me if I take a moment to describe something unrelated to your game in it’s completion before I say how it could tie into your future work. There is a mental tool I use when hiking in areas that have some vertical relief to them. I pay attention to the way water would flow on the ground, and use that to keep track of where I am. Water will always carve its own path to low ground, creating individual basins in the process. So long as there is some vertical relief to the landscape these basins are not shared anywhere except their exit point. Think of a river wandering though a hilly landscape. That river carves its own basin. Each stream leading into that river has its own basin, and each brook leading into those streams has its own unique basin so long as the land is not flat. This pattern continues on for a while out into basins that are too small or too dry to support permanent surface water. You can use this trend to keep track of where you are by being aware of which basin you are in and recognizing when and where you enter a new basin as you move. When landscapes are viewed in this way it is easier to commit the general trend of the landscape to memory. The shape of the land becomes tamable, and shrinks into something that can be held in the mind all at once. I think this trick might be useful to you, if applied in the context of procedural generation of landscapes in future projects. One of the things I enjoyed most about The Long Dark was the exploration, and for the first few plays, being genuinely lost. However, that experience is now unavailable to me. I have memorized both the macro and micro terrain in all your maps… sadly there are very few surprises left. I don’t even bother to figure out which way is North or South, it’s all just memorized. The pleasure of exploring is gone. It makes me appreciate getting caught out in the fog, as it one of the few times I have wonder where things are in relation to each other. I would not appreciate a game that is fully procedurally generated. You have demonstrated far too much still in making your landscapes to contemplate abandoning that skill. By all means, keep producing maps with well thought out landscapes, micro terrain, authored opportunities and threats. What I think is that, in some future project set on Great Bear island or elsewhere, you could make a map that is composed of tiles of authored content scattered about in a procedurally generated mosaic. And you could use the way water flows on the ground to give structure to that mosaic, keeping the procedural generation realistic and navigable to the player. The procedurally generated portions of this map could be redrawn each “life” in survival game modes. This would make loading a new game kind of time consuming, and each saved game would consume a massive amount of memory. I think it would be worth it. It would make the mapping tools you’ve developed worthwhile, and most importantly it would give players like me the feeling of exploring new ground. Every time. Imagine a playable space that is 100 units wide and deep. Each 10 unit by 10 unit section is a "tile", equivalent in size to one of the larger sized maps in The Long Dark as it is now. And if a 10x10 unit piece is a tile of authored content, then the 1x1 “chips” are spaces for procedurally generated landscapes. If you don’t mind, I will use places from The Long Dark to illustrate this idea, since they are known to us both. Somewhere on the perimeter of this 100x100 grid is a tile featuring the mouth of a river, “Delta” let's call it, where a big river empties into the ocean. To the left and right of Delta, or the edge of the playable space, is at least 60 but no more than 200 units worth of coastline, with tiles like Costal Highway and Bleak Inlet offering authored experiences and resources in a otherwise procedurally generated coastline. (Why the upper limit on the coastline? To limit the number of outlets for flowing water on the map. It might be easer to program and play if most water has to flow to Delta, and if there is coastline all around the map the resulting landscape would be rather unrealistic.) Extending inland from Delta would be a river, and that river would wind across the 100x100 grid as it breaks up into smaller and smaller tributaries. Each tile of authored content would then attach to that waterway. It will be necessary to keep in mind where the water flows out of each tile, as that point is where it anchors onto the grid. The volume of water flowing out of a tile would also determine where in the waterway it is should be found. A tile like Pleasant Valley, with its fairly large waterway, should be found directly off the main river. A tile like Timberwolf Mountain, with its relatively tiny potential outlet for water (that currently “flows” into Ash Canyon) would be found on or just beyond one of the smaller tributaries. The space in between tiles would be filled with procedurally generated content, gentile hills covered in forest would be easy on the programming and pleasant for the player. Why use the way water would flow on the ground to guide the generation of this landscape? Because it would most easily accommodate verticality in the playable space. Roads could also be used, but they would be much more limiting in terms of verticality. Both water and roads could also be used, but I would caution against that. The more variables that need satisfaction in this system of equations the less number of potential solutions there will be. And what to do about the edges of the map? Good question. Perhaps, upon stepping outside the boundary, the land outside of the playable grid goes black and white while the land inside retains its color, and a timer starts… there are many options. If each authored tile is about 10 by 10 units and you had 8 to 12 such tiles, you could get a playable space that is ten times bigger for (what I hope would be) slightly more programming work than would go into making those authored tiles. The end result would be massive, but at least its creation can be broken up into discrete steps. First the program choses a space on the perimeter to be Delta. Then, using coastline themed tiles and chips the coast line is built on a portion of the grid’s perimeter. Next, starting from the river’s entrance on Delta and using chip sized elements the river and its tributaries are drawn inwards and upwards in such a way that the remaining tiles have appropriate places to be attached. Once the tiles are attached to the waterways the spaces in-between can be filled in with chip sized procedurally generated land. The resulting player experience would be excellent, I think. Each survival game would have its own unique landscape. Even for experienced players, they would start a new game knowing that Tiles would be out there, somewhere, that would offer known resources, advantages and micro terrain. But in-between those somewheres and here is an expanse of unknown. The mapping tool in the game would become essential for long term survival. But more importantly players would have the opportunity to explore, and in the process of they would have to pay attention to the land, to the rising and the setting of the sun, to themselves, and pay attention to movement of water. That is a game I would pay for.