Stuffed Plush Chainsaw

Funny enough I was thinking about how Subnautica plays in this regard, and it follows a similar path. TLD just cranks this concept up to 11. A stark contrast to TLD while being somewhat similar in other regards is The Forest. The Forest has intentionally upsetting themes and imaginary, and very deliberately tries to scare you. Being scared and afraid are two different concepts in my opinion. Being scared stems from the unknown, the unexpected, the unimagined coming at you at a pace too fast and/or too obscure for you to understand, but acquiring knowledge about what scares you usually alleviates its severity. On the other hand being afraid is based in (at least what is perceived as) knowledge of a realistic and substantial danger, the awareness of obstacles so hard to overcome that failure is likely rather than possible, and the foreboding that whatever fate you struggle to escape might turn out inevitable - and acquiring better understanding about what you are right to be afraid of doesn't make it go away one bit, usually the opposite is true. Walking into that snowstorm isn't scary. But the realization that you very likely will not come out on the other end instills more fear in you than any zombie ever could. In a way fear is the big, substantial brother of horror that doesn't go away once you look it in the eye.

Horror is a genre I would describe as one that instills fear in you by confronting you with unpredictable, often rapidly occurring instances of unspeakable, unimaginable, unnatural things a normal person would be terrified of mostly by the inability to comprehend the true extend of terror they pose. The Long Dark isn't that. The Long Dark has for sure elements of the horror genre here and there. There are actually jump scares, especially when being immersed in darkness or bad visibility, yes, there is a certain eeriness to many places and situations, sure, and behind everything there is an unresolved mystery which is slightly otherworldly. One might even dread the idea of being absolutely and ultimately alone, or that there is no real hope to be had. But as for the genre a big part is the "intention" behind it. The Long Dark does not intend to terrify you. It does not intend to confront you with circumstances beyond normal human comprehension. It does not play on hyper-fears for the sake of you being terrified. What it does is expose you to very real, primal fears: the dark, predators, being lost, isolation, the lack of food and shelter, which all culminate in the uncertainty of whether or not your end lurks behind the next corner. But these are very much very natural sources of anxiety, anxiety evolution has instilled in you, and these are situations you would certainly dread in real life, but which are not constructed to terrify you. They just do.

This "issue" is pretty much as old as the game itself, and since it has come up so many times over the years one can assume that the developers/designers want this mechanic to be in the game. I can imagine this has been a topic in a few team meetings, and I guess the consensus they arrived at every time reflects very much @ManicManiac's standpoint, meaning the designers want mishaps to happen. I generally agree with that point of view as mistakes made should be punished accordingly to entice care and mindfulness, while rewarding those that practice it, and this way the game does an overall great job of making your actions - or your mistakes - matter. That being said ..... (and a similar point as been made before, too) I get accidentally firing a weapon. I get accidentally "throwing" a torch or a stone to some degree as it might represent dropping them. I get a lot of unintended interactions in the game that one can make and thoroughly regret. I do. But what I don't get is taking a big bite out of raw meat by accident - and this was patched out of the game right after Vigilant Flame hit, and rightly so, because a simple misclick could cripple you (insta-parasites from raw predator meat). And what I also do not get is grabbing my pack of matches, opening it, lighting a match and then holding it to a torch by accident. If @TwoFatCatz's suggestion was being implemented I would get that, sure, the action would still accidentally "happen", but there would be no punishment tied to it. And considering matches are finite and on Interloper pretty rare the ratio between "mishap" and "punishment" feels unbalanced. But that's just my 2 euro-cents. How do I circumvent this issue? Raid the Summit as early as possible, get the firestriker, and keep it with me at all times so I get the dialogue that actually asks me what I would like to do. And since as stated above the designers apparently have no intention of "fixing" what they apparently do not consider an issue .... this is much more practical than writing multi-paragraph contributions to a topic settled ages ago as I do. 🤔😅

Flare shells will only regularly spawn in the world if "Baseline Resource Availability" is set to Medium or higher. If Low you will get only the few flare shells you find with the various flare guns in the game as you would in a normal Interloper game.

Maybe that you cannot get past the loading screen has to do with you being offline in Steam? I remember there was such an issue recently. (Not saying this would be a fix for the actual issue...)

I haven't fiddled with Linux systems as Desktop OS for a while. But I imagine I remember that the standard GL API for TLD on Linux now is Vulkan (since Unity 2021-something?). If that is accurate, this might point to some problem with the driver stack not properly implementing Vulkan support. Might be worth looking into what vulkaninfo conjures up running in a terminal with X/wayland context. In general it's really hard to diagnose gaming stuff on Linux systems since (as you probably are aware) Linux really is a broad umbrella term for a wild bunch of rogue guerilla Operating Systems (aka distributions) that use some version of the Linux kernel and mostly somewhat common userspace tools. Edit: I really wouldn't be surprised if the openGL implementation of TLD is maintained/tested rather sparsely as openGL clearly is on the way out pretty much everywhere.

@xannamight be onto something with -disable-postprocess, or better removing it. Cycling through several PostFX setting might help. Also maybe look for any residual launch flags from earlier versions relating to glcore. Also looking into your driver stack (kernel drivers, mesa) might be helpful. As a last resort: playing TLD via Proton has fixed many Linux-related issues in the past (I know, I never liked that, too 🙄) In general I feel like lighting on linux especially has been wonky ever since TLD got HDR support on consoles. I can remember several threads complaining about rooms being too dark in the past, as this really keeps coming up time and again (a pattern which @ManicManiac indeed accurately identified), and at the same time people keep complaining about snow blindness ever since. What would really help would be notice from Hinterland if darker interiors are indeed intended - meaning they are a design choice - or if this indeed is a bug for some. For example, on Mac (M1, no launch flags), the one location I found significantly darker (so far ...) is the Carter Hydro Dam, while everything else seems (mostly?) the same.

Hello, having been fiddling with Unity for a work related project I stumbled across the HDRP and Path Tracing. Now considering that - this is already Part of Unity - TLD has a particularly low polygon count (for a modern game), which (afaiui) makes de-noising path traced imagery simpler/less computationally expensive - TLD's atmosphere is very reliant on lighting effects which would clearly benefit from such tech ... wouldn't TLD make a prime candidate for such an implementation that could not only genuinely look pretty awesome, but would also massively polish the admittedly rather dated look of the game? Considering TLD has a rather rustic look you could probably even cut a few corners on denoising, and probably come out okay-enough to not require a 1500$ GPU. Also maybe this is a stupid idea. 🤷‍♂️

So Schrödinger's Cat is still up for debate - but his Bear is real, indeed. Interesting. 🤔

1) This also applies to Mac, so I guess this is Steam-Specific. 2) If you switch to online while the screen is still shown "Loading" will magically resume. Probably some data being synced with Steam that the game is waiting on without checking if steam is actually online. Easy to miss, but also easy to fix. Can't imagine this being intentional, however it really would be interesting to know what kind of data the game exchanges at this moment. I would suspect, being the well-meaning unsuspecting citizen of Great Bear that I am, that the game tries to look up if something about the content the player owns might have changed.... trustno1.

Okay. That proves at least part of the equation false. So Metal 3 isn't the issue.

In this case this might be a very, very wise policy.

The interesting thing about this is that such a mechanic already exists in the game. Certain items like ammunition, matches or coffee tins already "collapse" into a singularly rendered item in the real world when dropped together. It should be conceivable that this is used for other things like sticks, feathers, arrow heads, cat tails, etc.

I mean that idea really is kinda cool, but: Nope. Far from it. Not gonna go into details, but spray paint itself probably was a pretty nifty thing to pull off code wise. Now make that spray paint have luminosity depending on when it last got light? Man.

In all likelihood they weren't aware of this as it isn't even clear what the exact root cause is that apparently only arises with certain configurations that aren't even that common. The vast majority of Macs out there run intel HD/Iris iGPUs, all the new ones run Apples "own" GPUs. Only a certain subset of at least three year old, rather expensive and hence much less common machines use AMD cards, and apparently only those running Ventura have this issue, and even then only a small portion of applications seem affected, probably all doing the one thing that this particular combination gets wrong. This is pretty much a bug from hell.

Apparently (as I mentioned in another thread) there seems to be a particular problem with Metal 3 on Intel Macs with AMD cards that arises when running certain graphics workloads. I assume it's something not quite working out with the AMD driver and the new API. It's also not isolated to games, as I know of at least one AMD GPU Mac (iMac Pro with a Vega56) that fails rendering in Blender when using Metal since Ventura (which makes it Metal 3 if the hardware supports it), and that also show the same problems when running TLD as I found out earlier today. As also stated elsewhere I suspect this is a problem only Apple can fix. However, and that's the good news: it's almost certainly entirely a software problem. So, provided our overlord, Tim Apple, wishes it to be, this will eventually get a fix. Also: at least those "legacy Macs" (9900K *cough*) run Windows. So while inconvenient there at least is a solution. Trust me, that's a hell of a lot better than having "Apple Silicon" and realizing that you now have to run something that has no Mac port in a VM that's dog slow because on top of virtualization you now also have to run Microsoft's not-so-great AMD64-on-ARM emulation in a VM - because if it doesn't have a Mac port it most likely has no ARM native Windows port either. Yes, it's as terrible as it sounds.

Very much in favor of this. In fact: why not have "new" bunkers pop up from under the snow every so often? Could be a really-long-game mechanic where you, after let's say 150 or so days (basically after you've had the chance to explore most of the world), every 40 to 60 days (randomized), you get a storm much like the whiteout challenge, with like 2 or 3 days warning in advance (Audio cue like: "I can feel there's a real storm brewing.") That would cover up previously discovered bunkers, but would also reveal one or two new bunkers somewhere in the world. Would give late-late-game a real incentive to go out there and do stuff instead of passing time for 10 years. Edit: To make this really fun .... let's have like -20°C or worse inside buildings when that calamity is raging. 😄 Much like 4DON Day 4. Haven't noticed that at all. I don't think that's what's going on.

Both very much new. Kinda like how they fine tuned a lot the placement of a lot of things.

Of course. Just wanted to pitch in that I have the creeping suspicion this issue is a more general one.

I'll take one as well, please. Pretty amazing artwork.

Not entirely sure if the entire Metal 3 + AMD Graphics issue is entirely solvable by Hinterland / Unity. We've got an old iMac Pro (the 2017 thingy) at work, which has been acting up (especially with Blender) since Ventura came out. Now I got around to running a short test with TLD on it, and it's acting up much in the same way as described above (it runs fine with openGL however). Reminds me of the days when High Sierra broke Iris iGPU support for months on end for many, many games. Something definitely is up with the AMD / Metal implementation, and it's very possible that this is something only Tim Apple himself can fix. 😕

Then I stand corrected. It's been a while since I've tinkered with mods actively. I pretty much gave up on it with the switch to IL2CPP. Yeah, those pesky things keeping people from the truly important things in life. I can relate. 😅 All in all I guess the situation is mostly this: there has been a change in stance towards modding, but it's really not high up on the list of things to get done. This would explain some amount of work being done, as you alluded to, while at the same time not really happening a lot "visible" to the folks not working on mods.

That's not an entirely new idea, and it was struck down in the past as it would add extra (and maybe artificial) complexity to the game. There was (or is?) a mod that implemented this type of game play, however. I found it quite fun, but it was a hassle until you found a decent amount of bottles.

While that might be a reason I don't feel like this qualifies as an argument. 😉 I guess the most straightforward way to implement this would be to have a container with x amount of kilograms of space which you could access by clicking the travois, much like any other container. Dragging the travois then would be mostly a problem of how to implement actually dragging an entity around behind you. I guess you could implement some logic that would even adapt the amount of slow down dragging a travois would inflict based on how much weight is loaded into it. I don't feel like the travois fixes the biggest problem with quartering: you have to spend an additional hour quartering an animal. Let's assume your deer has 10 kilograms of meat, you have carcass harvesting 5 and an improvised knife, then you could just take those in the same amount of time plus 40 + 2x10 minutes for hide and guts. If you quarter the animal you get hide and guts instantly, but then still have to carve up 10 kilograms of meat - only if you don't do it on the spot you have to carry twice the weight in meat. So bottom line: quartering deer and wolves rarely proves advantageous, both in terms of time requirement and logistics, travois or not. The fact that there exists such a "break even point" for quartering, and that you usually do not reach it with smaller animals goes to show that the mechanic is badly designed and if not replacement could at least use some updating. Although: if you could put a deer or a wolf on a travois as a whole .... maybe that would be something. (And if you meant just that I didn't say a thing 😄 )

Guess I blew the fanfare a bit prematurely. While it is running very, very fast and so far very much stable, there is this rather peculiar glitch that happens whether or not you run the game with openGL (-force-glcore) or Metal. screencap.mov Only happens to two-dimensional objects like far away (LOD'd) trees and some decorative shrubs, and mostly when there is foggy/misty weather, so you can ameliorate this to some degree by putting rendering distances to the absolute max - which the M1 Max handles ezpz - but PV is really, really, really big. Fiddling with any other in-game quality or display settings has no effect on this. Looks like something going wrong in the shader pipeline overlaying multiple transparencies. I know TLD uses some custom shaders, so maybe this is one you guys wrote and hence you can fix it. 🤷‍♂️ System is an Apple M1 Max (24c) Mac Studio with 32 Gig, running MacOS 13.2.1.