Animations for fire making [POLL]

[SteveP]

See Poll

Making fire is an intrinsic part of the game. I would love to see a lot more loving attention lavished on the whole fire mechanic!

Thanks to Hinterland for all the recent new animations for things like lighting the lantern, striking a flare or match and so forth. Really helps enhance immersion and brings a much greater sense of realism.

Tip: lighting the lantern seems to bring the visual focus level. I've been lost in the dark at times so this seems to be a good way to re-calibrate one's bearings, at least in the same vertical plane. Navigating the dark using a mouse is harder than with an XBox controller. I think we can still use an XBox controller in a USB port on a PC; can someone confirm that?

[SteveP]

Here is a related thread on making it difficult to start a fire because of shivering: Fire starting chance decrease while freezing !!!

Here's the short story by Jack London "To Build a Fire"

The Cliff Notes version is here: Jack London To Build a Fire (Wikipedia)

Here is a story about a survival aficionado, Richard Code, who died of hypothermia and who over-estimated his ability to make fire; it's an interesting, illuminating story.

Curious about how difficult it is to start a fire when you are hypothermic?

Here's a challenge; Seek to 36 minutes:

 

 

[SteveP]

How to Build a Survival Fire in Bad Weather

A snowstorm is no time to look for fungus or dry grass. Bring tinder with you. Cotton balls smeared with petroleum jelly are as good as anything you can buy. Make a softball-size nest of bark shavings, rusted pine needles, and feathered wood from your kindling splits, place the tinder on it, then loosely cover the tinder with more needles and shavings. Build a tepee from your kindling around the tinder, starting with the tiny twigs and working your way up to kindling as thick as your thumb.

Tip: For insurance, I pack a finger-size stick of resin-soaked fatwood (pine). It provides long-lasting tinder for igniting kindling in wet weather.

Light It Up

Forget those windproof matches that require a chemical reaction to ignite. Gum up the striking strip and they might as well be toothpicks. The best sources of ignition in really bad weather are a butane lighter that provides a tall, strong flame and a sparking steel that will throw a shower of white-hot sparks and the wind be damned. Carry both.

Tip: The sparking steel I use includes a magnesium rod and is set into a wooden handle, both of which can be shaved off and used as tinder.

Once you have the tepee fire blazing, cross it with your wrist-thick kindling and start to add larger fuel. A warming fire should be as long as your body and backed by a wall of logs or rocks to reflect the heat back at you. Once it's established, add a few green logs, which burn with fewer BTUs than dry logs but last longer, ensuring that you will outlive the moon for at least one more night.

[Timber Wolf]

On 3/14/2017 at 4:45 AM, SteveP said:

Making fire is an intrinsic part of the game. I would love to see a lot more loving attention lavished on the whole fire mechanic!

I completely agree!  I would love to see any or all of this implemented.

[SteveP]

I forgot to include kindling in the options. Making kindling is an important step. It would be wise to prepare and carry a small bundle of kindling made from sticks: two sticks makes a nice bundle of kindling or the equivalent amount of cedar, when split with knife or hatchet would also make good kindling. Kindling should increase the probability of fire success. It takes about 10-15 minutes to make a small bit of kindling and 30 minutes or so to prepare it from a chunk of cedar using the hatchet.

[SteveP]

If you are on Pilgrim, perhaps fire making is much easier whereas on Stalker or Interloper, it can require more preparation. Having kindling shortens the time it takes to build a fire whereas no kindling should cause the fire building process to take 10-30 minutes. If these changes are made, it might be necessary to retune The Hunted challenge slightly.

[cekivi]

I'm always in favour of anything that makes the game more immersive. I don't think Pilgrim and Voyager players would like it much though if hypothermia made it harder to start fires. It would provide an excellent use for lighter fuel though!

[AZHockeyNut]

poll has a problem, if you select No Don't care, and do not select anything in the second section because why would you falsely inflate something in part 2 if you don't care?

you get that it is required and your vote does not count. @SteveP you might consider adding a don't care or I voted NO option for #2.

 

[DragonXIII]

I honestly don't know about this. The idea that more immersion equals a better game is not necessarily true. There is tons of source material about what is known as the "Immersive Fallacy", a term I first came across in Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. In the book, they point out that enjoyable game-play is achieved "through play itself" rather than by creating a simulated reality indistinguishable from our own reality. They go on to say that play is "a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation." Sure, we might become engrossed in a particularly "immersive" game, but what is it that makes it so? Is it really about perfectly simulating reality to the point that simple tasks within the game become a struggle to achieve? Or is it about finding that perfect balance between realism and game-play that causes you to keep playing the game until you suddenly look at the clock and realize, "holy ****, it's 5 am!"?

To bring this to the subject at hand for this thread, animations might be good, but we shouldn't sacrifice game-play for unnecessary realism. Fire-starting is absolutely an intrinsic part of this game, without it we are dead in the water (or without water, as the case may be). Currently, fire-starting involves selecting your materials, pressing a button, and watching a progress bar (hoping that you don't fail). If we had some simple animations to watch, instead of just watching a progress bar fill, that would be great, but those animations should be irrelevant to the mechanics of game-play.

In real life, hypothermia and other conditions you would likely be suffering from in a survival scenario would absolutely affect your ability to start a fire. That doesn't mean they should affect your ability to start a fire in the game. Sure, there are probably plenty of people who specifically look for this level of realism in their games, but I expect that they are an extremely small minority. When you're making a game you have to consider your average target audience, not just the minority of hardcore realism fanatics.

In the end, what makes a good game is such a subjective concept that a discussion of it would fill an entire book (or several). Seeing as there are literally hundreds of books on game design, I think we can accept that there is no single correct answer. You're never going to please 100% of the people 100% of the time, so that should never be your goal. In my opinion, your goal should be to find that balance between realism and game-play that works for whatever you are trying to achieve. I truly believe that Hinterland has achieved that in The Long Dark. Sure, some things could probably use a little more fine-tuning, but the game is still in alpha, so it'll probably happen. I can't even remember how many times I've been playing and said to myself, "one more day, I'll just survive one more day and then I'll go to bed", only to realize that I've been playing for 5 hours and haven't slept.

[SteveP]

11 hours ago, cekivi said:

I'm always in favour of anything that makes the game more immersive. I don't think Pilgrim and Voyager players would like it much though if hypothermia made it harder to start fires. It would provide an excellent use for lighter fuel though!

Pilgrim players presumably would not have problems starting fires; I guess it's up the the game community (fans and devs) to decide how easy it is on Pilgrim. Would it just be matches that are affected by hypothermia and shivering? Wouldn't you start shivering immediately when you began freezing? It's an incentive to make fires more frequently. I have never run out of matches during game play so I tend to make a lot of fires especially when traveling so that I avoid condition loss. I think the idea here is to avoid minimalist play styles where you simply disregard the survival issues associated with keeping your core temperature up and abuse the condition bar system.

It seems to me that the purpose of Pilgrim is to make it easier to learn the game maps, explore and just generally have a pleasant experience. Part of that experience that is enjoyable is a nice roaring bonfire!

[SteveP]

10 hours ago, DragonXIII said:

To bring this to the subject at hand for this thread, animations might be good, but we shouldn't sacrifice game-play for unnecessary realism. Fire-starting is absolutely an intrinsic part of this game, without it we are dead in the water (or without water, as the case may be). Currently, fire-starting involves selecting your materials, pressing a button, and watching a progress bar (hoping that you don't fail). If we had some simple animations to watch, instead of just watching a progress bar fill, that would be great, but those animations should be irrelevant to the mechanics of game-play.

I guess we could have restructured the poll to ask how satisfied we are with the current system however that tends to skew results with positive bias toward satisfaction with the current implementation. There is probably a goodly set of folks who don't want to see changes in the game play as they have adapted to the current game and don't want change. Change can be upsetting; I know I felt upset at times when things got much harder when certain features went away. I've also seen folks upset when new  features are added especially when they make the game more evolved. On the other side of that coin, for new folks who buy the game post-release, they would have the benefit of an evolved gaming system and it would be static. Personally, I have found the evolution of the game to be a positive thing since it forced me to step up my game and increased the challenge level of the game. As you can see, this feature of shivering is designed to make the game even more difficult for Interlopers; these guys should have the entire, bitter Jack London experience! Mother Nature takes no pity on humans; why should the game? That seems to fit well with the theme of the game, that death is final (until you restart) and the threat of death is ever-present, thus adding to in-game tension.

There are two sides to this question: 1) purely aesthetic 2) expanding game play with shivering. In real life survival, we are seldom caught so ill prepared that we are without suitable clothing and a BIC lighter as well as Vaseline soaked cotton balls and accelerant! If fire making were enhanced, these advanced tinder options would be great such as making feather sticks, gathering specific tinder sources and utilizing birch bark, which in the game, doesn't give much advantage. Birch bark is my all time tinder of choice! It works really well and doesn't require me to use costly accelerants; it is an accelerant. We haven't mentioned the Ronson lighter or the ubiquitous butane lighters recently! Those were options of previous polls. By confining fire making to matches; we acknowledge the inherent difficulty of using matches to make fire. Personally, I hate match fires especially paper matches. I never rely on them, however I try to keep a pack of paper matches around for back up in case all of the dozens of lighters around don't work. I have at rare times, resorted to lighting my smoke from a stove element.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

[CalNieDaGtarGuy]

Gangrenous fingers wouldn't come into play until severe advancement of the frostbite. Also, gangrene would be absolutely no fun. Which is why I honestly, in a sick sense, really want this added.