stratvox

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Everything posted by stratvox

  1. Yeah, it's still busted. I've gone to their support portal to report it. I'd suggest you do the same; I'm pretty sure the number of reports of a bug is relevant to how likely it is to get addressed. Not necessarily be all and end all... but relevant.
  2. Aye, but in the meantime, this gets most of the way towards what most of the people in this thread seem to be asking for wrt item spawns in the game as it exists right now... not much stuff but having the possibility of getting the good stuff. I'm not suggesting it's for everyone, but at least it's worth it for folks to try it out.
  3. Try setting baseline to high or very high, empty container chance to the max, and container item density to the lowest setting, and loose item availability to high. You can get top tier stuff but with container density to low and empty container to high you end up really not finding a lot of stuff. In my experiments with custom games setting the container stuff up like that ends up with ~>90% of containers having nothing in them whatsoever... and with baseline set to very high there are a lot of containers that you can use for storage in the buildings etc but they're almost all empty.
  4. When the bear comes for you, you're going to just let it happen. That's how it works with bears.
  5. Well, you know... this game is pretty much the ne plus ultra of a game set in Canada, and I'm Canadian, so I know all the cultural references. I've posted about some of this quite some time back and included some pictures of the paintings that I'm sure inspired some of the art style of the game in and in which have some nice pictures in them. I spent part of my childhood living in Prince George in the BC interior in the Rocky Mountains. This game really speaks to me.
  6. The overall art style is simplified, and hearkens back to the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, and other Canadian painters from the first half of the twentieth century... though they largely worked in oils, not watercolour; I suspect that sort of watercolour art style used in this game is more easily carried off in computer games than trying to make the world look like a Tom Thompson oil. It's not really supposed to be realistic; it's the way a painter would paint it if carried by a figure in the mid-ground of a landscape. Even the music you hear on the radio when you switch one on points at Canadian culture; while the recording used in the game is not him, it's very reminiscent of the kind of thing you'd hear from Glenn Gould, who was considered one of the best classical pianists in the world in the forties and fifties; his recordings of Bach are legendary. I think it'd be awesome if Hinterland could swing getting literally hours of Glenn Gould into the game for use when the radio is on; he's got tons of recordings (not all of which are solo piano pieces) and it'd be a super nice touch to the game... like someone freezing to death at one of the repeaters up there put the big ol' NFB reel to reel of Glenn Gould playing Bach and The Idea of North on to die to and now you can hear his dying music every time the Aurora is out.
  7. Actually, the reasons are historical and climatic. First, the history: the Lee-Enfield rifle has been used there for over a century, both by just folks and the military, in particular the Canadian Rangers reserve unit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Rangers). They are still in use by this unit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Rangers#Weapons). That rifle is an iconic rifle in Canada, far more than M4s or Winchesters and so on. There's a decent article on the effort to replace the rifle here: https://uphere.ca/articles/tale-two-rifles. This rifle says Mad Trapper, this rifle says Call of the Wild, this rifle says Farley Mowat, this rifle says Klondike gold rush. It's the right model. The climatic reason the rifle has the full wooden stock covering the majority of the barrel is to make it easier to use in arctic winter temperatures. If it's -45 and you put your bare hands on the barrel, you are inviting serious injury. Wood is a far better material than metal to be touching in those conditions.
  8. There is a lot of high ground in ML. It's worth checking all of it out if you can. Some of those tree-clothed plateaus have a LOT of firewood on them. From there try following all the high ground along the right side of the river travelling towards the dam until you get to the little pond area with the deer just shy of the trailers. You get some cool views on weird little corners of the map by doing that. It's also awesome for avoiding wolves; even if they become aware of you, it's hard for them to path to you up there.
  9. Well, for me, it's more that seeing a polar bear or a walrus would pretty much take me out of the willing suspension of disbelief. It's just the wrong environment for them. It might be cool to make another game in the same universe that was set on Baffin Island in Nunavut; in that game you'd be ice fishing, seeking out seal breathing holes in the ice and waiting there with a spear for one to show up, avoiding polar bears and walruses and wolves, maybe hunting caribou, snaring arctic hares, and perhaps there'd be a role for ptarmigans. There'd be no trees, and abandoned villages and towns with the houses up on stilts because of the permafrost. Getting the materials together to make fire could be challenging. Being out on the winter ice could well turn out to be a better play than staying on land. I could see that being a very cool game, and even one that might be worth considering for Hinterland, but I don't see any of those things happening in this game.
  10. The big problem with the polar bear is that there are no polar bears in that part of the world. No tundra either. It's just not the right place for those things. A very rare spirit bear (basically, a spirit bear is a particular genetic anomaly in the Great Bear Rainforest up that way that has very pale fur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermode_bear It's a sub-species of the black bear. It'd be awesome to see one of those sometime. Hey @Raphael van Lierop, is that the easter egg I've heard noised about?
  11. This could be a great idea! Also, it reminds me... it'd be awesome if the day precessed with the seasons. Pick a date for game start, and have the length of the days and nights follow the natural order of how they go. It'd also be great if the sky followed the rules, with Polaris always at the north and the usual familiar constellations up, with their positions accurately reflecting the date. Programming it would be interesting, but it's certainly doable. It could make for some fun times wrt navigation throughout the world. When modding comes I may take a shot at doing that.
  12. I've had some experience with this lately. If you're standing too close to the entrance the animal can get you, but if you're backed away it can't. Raging moose, timberwolves, and bears will run around and try and fail to enter, making for an easy kill. I've also found that keeping a bunch of rotting meat in the blind is a great way to pull in the predators (wolves, timberwolves); you pick up the meat when you can see the predators down wind, and then crouch (which also helps keep you out of the wind) and wait. When the predator sniffs around the door a quick arrow to the melon and it's lunch time. Crouching makes it far more likely you'll be able to aim at the timberwolf and get the shot off because if they can smell the meat but not see you or be aware of your presence you can line up the shot quite nicely.
  13. No, not that often. One about every fifteen to twenty days or so. I was frankly shocked when I saw the moose return as quickly as it did. It's possible that the RNG god smiled upon me, which is why I want to hang out for a bit more time in this area of the map, to see if the pattern holds. Even so, I would've expected to see the respawn happen every fifty days, not fifteen. You should take the hide, at least. Repair materials for your boots and pants are hard to come by in Bleak Inlet, at least so far for me. That might mean the deer spawns in immediately, and I just didn't see it until after I'd broken the pack. Still, I'm hoping to get back up there in another month or so to see what's happened to the wildlife up there after I lived there for a week or three earlier while I explored it. I'm esp. curious about the wolves because I made very sure I killed them ALL before I left. Think of it as a control group. Well, they're being treated as a unit, so I think it makes sense to attempt to play with unit respawn rates as well as individual wolf respawn rates. I'm hoping that part of the gameplay is that destroying the unit completely will result in a long clock before the unit respawns. If that's true, the smart play is to use the blinds or whatever to pull in and kill all but one wolf. Depending on what kind of shape you're in, wait for another one to respawn into the pack, and then pull the two in, kill one, and then hunt down the other because killing the one cost you nothing. Basically I've been hanging out in the Frozen Delta for a long time to give me time to figure out the right ways to deal with the timberwolves, both in terms of avoidance and elimination. It seems that smelly meat can pull them from a LONG way away, which means that they become controllable by the smell of meat. Bringing the pack to your impregnable position by manipulating their behaviour via thrown stones and scent looks like the smart way to deal with them to me.
  14. Cool. However, let's face facts here... if you find a bear, and want to remain true to the spirit of the game, you back away slowly and slink away before it notices that you're there. Unless you've got the orbital bombardment power up. Then you can order Captain Gabriel Angelos to loose it upon your nemesis Old Bear Khorne, enjoy the fireworks, and then after, the pre-seared bear steaks will sustain you. Yeah... just like that.
  15. I'm going to use this as a scratch pad to make notes about dealing with BI and the timberwolves there. Note: playing Voyageur, which seems to be a good difficulty to use to get a handle on timberwolf behaviour and how to exploit it; I would not want to be trying this on Stalker as my initial experimental run. If you start there, get out of the region fast and do not return until you are very well equipped. It's almost always very windy there; dress accordingly. You can move around the very edge of the map around the Frozen Delta area in almost complete safety. It seems that the moose is the primary meat bearing animal; I've seen only one deer, up on the plateau, and only after I broke the pack up on the plateau. I eventually hunted that pack to extinction. I'm hoping that my theory that if you kill ALL the wolves in a pack it greatly lengthens the time it'll take for them to respawn and may permit deer to spawn into the region. On the other hand I've only been in there for a few weeks of game time and I've killed two moose so far. N.B. - moose still cannot path into the blinds, but they can see you and will try to get in, which is great if you can get the moose to trip out on you; turns it into an easy kill. This means that it is entirely possible for your main prey animal to kick the crap out of ya. If I see a third moose show up in a week or so that'll pretty much confirm that the moose is the intended grocery larder for BI because that'll far exceed the spawn rate I've ever seen in any other region. Like hugely exceed it. If you want moose, it looks like BI is your spot. Enter from FM. The Hunter's Blinds in the Frozen Delta area are well situated for tempting timberwolves into attacking so you can pick them off. I used smell to pull them over and bows and arrows to dispatch them. Their appears to be a new change in pathing; timberwolves can come right up to the entrance and if you're standing close enough to the entrance, they can take a bite; however it doesn't appear as if they can come right inside. I'm curious if this is true for plain wolves now, but I've not had a chance to find out. It does require a different way of using the bow; it seems that pull release is how you want to do this rather than lining it up; lining it up takes too long and the wolf will have enough time to get out of the way. I suspect that logs/fallen trees (which I hear they can path up on) are going to be useful in the same way; by confining the path they're on you can guarantee a hit with a bow and arrow by just pulling and releasing without stressing about the aim too much; just so long as the path down the trunk is in the centre of the screen you're going to hit anything that's on it when you release. Anyway, I found that if I was in the back corner away from the stairs up, they couldn't reach me, at least not before I was able to put an arrow into them while they were confined by the door opening and staircase and couldn't veer away from my aim as they tried to get in to get me. The hunter blinds used properly are incredible for dispatching the TWs with minimal risk and damage to the player. I've used thrown stones and meat/guts to get them to come to me and then arrows to kill them twice and it has worked quite well so far. There's one closer to the broken bridge along the south eastern edge as you work your way around is the one I'm hoping to use to get the wolves between the delta and the cannery island to come to me so I can see them off too. At that point if my recon is right there are the TWs on the ice on the outside side of the cannery and the TWs right around the cannery itself. I haven't made my way around the cannery and across the long bridge yet to get to that part of the map, so I'm not too sure what the disposition over there is; this is all based on spending time cave living in the Frozen Delta part of the map. Guess I'll find out. So far, it is definitely true that one wants to be well prepared going in. However, I can say that I've been doing this without firearms and I've been remaining alive. It's just that one needs to recalibrate the expectations going in; I'm expecting that it'll take me a few more weeks before I will have sufficiently depopulated the timberwolves to make moving around the map safer than it is now. I'm pretty sure that this is the key; not only do you have to break the pack (which seems to happen when there's one left that hasn't taken an arrow), but after it breaks you must hunt the now-fleeing from the player remnants of the pack to ensure a decent amount of time before they reappear on the map. To me this is an extremely cool gameplay element; I've found my best luck to be by trapping the last member somewhere where they must pass you to escape so you can gift them a fletched iron-tipped stick and wait for it to return to you. Also I think that it's also possible to find paths that will get you almost every where while avoiding the timberwolf packs, though I'm not one hundred percent certain of that yet... a lot will remain to be seen when I finally get to cross the long bridge and explore on the other side of the radio tower promontory. Finally, I've seen people complaining about disappearing arrows. I've been on this map for weeks and I've lost two arrows... and I'm pretty sure I'll find them again. I entered with 25. At a couple of times (doing long range shooting at the moose, mostly) I've gotten myself down to seven, but I've always been able to find them again, though sometimes it has taken a significant amount of time to do so. I think that when you exit a building or wake up from sleeping the game is checking the locations of those things and if they fail their sanity check for location it places them on the surface of the snow so you can find them again. I head canon that by thinking that blowing and drifting snow has unburied the arrow from the snow bank it disappeared into.
  16. So, like Pokemon Go, but if you encounter a bear or a moose, you just get to take a beating from them?
  17. My thinking on this is that TWs have been put in BI specifically for massive play testing before bringing them to other regions; at least PV will get them eventually I reckon, and I could see them going to many other regions (like TWM) over time. I'm expecting fine tuning of behaviour etc after the holidays, probably in time for the next sand box release; until then BI's gonna be super dangerous, esp. for the Lopers out there. I'm wondering if the secret sauce with dealing with timberwolves might not be the need to hunt a pack to extinction; if you kill everybody in the pack it won't respawn, or perhaps will respawn plain wolves instead. Need to get enough time in on the map to see if that may be it. As an aside, I noticed some people talking about stones (which I've not yet tried) for breaking their morale. I think that perhaps the big advantage of stones might be that you don't need to aim to fire, like a revolver but not like rifles and bows, which means you may be able to freehand a rock into their melon without that whole "avoiding aim" thing that they do when using a bow (which so far has been the only weapon I've used). I need to fire up a sacrificial run so I can try it.
  18. I have never found anything behind the visors. Ever.
  19. Two comments. One, your video card is six years old, and from what I can find comes with 2GB memory; it's possible you're running out of VRAM for the game with some of the new resources that are loading to support some of the new features, regions, and critters. Also, I note that your game is "requesting fullscreen 1920 x 1080 at 0 Hz", which indicates that maybe you've got a weird configuration bug, because 0 Hz is not a valid screen refresh. Maybe start with running a steam file validation check. You can do this by right clicking on the game name in Steam and selecting properties, then selecting the "local files" tab, then running the validation check. If that doesn't work, try purging and reinstalling the game to see if it clears the problem up. If neither of those things work, I'd say go to the reporting page at https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us, select "ask for help/report an issue" and fill out the form there describing your problem.
  20. You're better off reporting it to the Hinterland bug tracker at https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us. Click on "Ask for help/Report an issue" on the upper right corner of the page. While sometimes they take a long time to get back to you, I can say that I have seen them fix bugs that I've reported using this mechanism.
  21. Have you reported it to their bugtracker? You can find it by going to https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us and clicking on the "Ask for help/Report an issue" link in the upper right corner of the page. Does the xbox have any kind of system log you could look at? Or maybe a log from the game? It might give you a clue as to what's happening. I've never owned one myself, so I have no idea if they exist or not.
  22. I endorse this idea. Would make those mornings sipping tea and nibbling moose next to the fire in the cave while a blizzard howls outside even more evocative. Being able to right click a cedar log and drop it into the fire would be <chef's kiss>.