Friday Facts #276 - Belt item spacing & Script rendering

[Klonan]

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-276

[SuperSandro2000]

Well at least they are buffed so nothing should break.
Could you fix that items port if you move them from one belt to another?

Klonan's Edit

I love it! You are the best devs!

Original reply:

First


PS: I am going to add something useful later.

[Engimage]

Oh my you just gave me a braingasm

8 spacing - so welcome!
This is why I do wait for FFFs every week since I met Factorio - Wube never stops amazing!

[Serenity]

Great changes with the belt speed. I understand why it was that way, but it is very weird in practice.
Of course this means I have to update lots of blueprints that are designed to consume and/or output exactly one or two belts of materials

EDIT:
This means you need 54 stone furnaces to fill a yellow belt. Or 54 steel ones for a red belt. 27 per side, which is obviously not good because it's odd
For beaconed electric furnaces it's great. Goes from 13 to 14 for a blue belt which solves some of the issues with balancing the output belt

[HornetSV]

I almost can see all the coments about belt changes, for me, indicates have to re-think all the compression formulas and that would be wonderfull, I like the math in it.

The hipe of the .17 could not be more high than now, very good job devs,so wonderfull job

[Shingen]

Despite having to change some blueprints now, i'm obviously 100% in support of this change.

Just one thing bugs me... why the hell was it the way it was for so long?

[fur_and_whiskers]

Fantastic!

[TearOfTheStar]

Just imagine the mix of Factorio and Tiberian Sun...

[Raphaello]

Very good change to the belts! Great.
Visually it looks a bit worse in 0.17 than in 0.16 due to the items overlapping more. Would it look better if the part of items that is covered by the next item on the belt was darker?

[kovarex]

Despite having to change some blueprints now, i'm obviously 100% in support of this change.

Just one thing bugs me... why the hell was it the way it was for so long?

Historical reasons.
The number was chosen in the ancient times when items on belts were entities with collision boxes.
It was derived from the current "item as entity on the ground" collision box.
Then it was just transitioned through the rewrites and optimisations religiously

[Jon8RFC]

My favorite change for 0.17 was the new fluid mechanics.

Possibly tied for favorite, is now the perfection that are belts operating at 15, 30, 45 items/second. That's one of those obsessive-compulsive itches that feels awesome to scratch.

[arrow in my gluteus]

There is a visual requirement that belts only move integer number of pixels every tick, so that is 1/2/3 pixels for transport belt, fast belt, express belt respectively.

Why? Aren't those pixel distances only valid for a zoom of 1.0 ? I assume it's more likely that a player is on a different zoom level and that those nice integer pixel distances are no longer integer.

[DanGio]

Very good changes. My bet on the plates recipe tweak : 3 plates are crafted every 8 seconds. The recipe numbers appear nice and round to the player, and it requires exactly 40 stone furnaces or 20 steel furnaces to smelt 1 belt. It would be a buff, but it would counter the mining drill debuff announced in FFF 266.

[V453000]

As the smelting recipe change, I am proposing the following:
- Iron plate, copper plate, stone brick: 3.2
- Steel: 16

That would mean exactly 48 stone furnaces per yellow belt, which is the number that people already build, but some of the last ones flicker with inactivity in 0.16, now all of them would work nonstop.

[sniderthanyou]

As the smelting recipe change, I am proposing the following:
- Iron plate, copper plate, stone brick: 3.2
- Steel: 16

I can't tell if you're joking or not

EDIT: OH that's the crafting time. Never mind

[V453000]

As the smelting recipe change, I am proposing the following:
- Iron plate, copper plate, stone brick: 3.2
- Steel: 16

I can't tell if you're joking or not

You mean the 3.2*5 = 16? Currently it's 3.5*5 = 17.5 (steel takes 5 iron plates)

[Allaizn]

As much as I'd like the furnace speed change (since faster furnaces mean less furnaces for the same throughput), I don't like the belt speed change at all.
As someone who is heavily using circuits I also see nearly no benefit of getting a constant amount of items per belt piece on fully compressed belts - how would that help with anything?
Trying to detect full throughput with read mode is now completely impossible, since you will never notice stutter in a constant value - whereas before you could look at the fluctuations and decide upon those (not pretty but possible).
Detecting full throughput with pulse mode is still possible, but the non-integer spacing between item pulses for blue belts will make it a lot harder to get a robust system going. The old system had this problem for red belts, which wasn't ideal, but I'd argue that it's plainly bad to ruin the niceness of the highest tier item.
I don't see how one could argue that this spacing is better for circuits than the old one, since I don't see circuits getting any easier, which in turn doesn't warrant breaking all old designs that related to the current state.
Note that now all the inserter/belt interactions will also have practically completely different timings, and you'd thus need to redo everything using those, too.
The few blueprints unaffected by the science changes, like smelters or circuits, will now also be broken in the sense that they can't consume their input fully and can't compress their output anymore. This isn't too hard to fix, but it means that you will have trouble finding the correct blueprint on the sharing sites, since the majority of blueprints will be of old designs (and I wouldn't be surprised to see absolutely none taking the effort to update their shared blueprints).

So what's up with this change? It makes a whole 3 numbers a tiny bit nicer, and powercreeps belts for no reason, while wrecking havoc on almost every existing thing using belts, which is an insanely bad tradeoff IMO.

Edit: oh, and I completely forgot that almost all mods will now need updating if they every cared about a nice factory/belt ratio, which is a further downside

[sniderthanyou]

You mean the 3.2*5 = 16? Currently it's 3.5*5 = 17.5 (steel takes 5 iron plates)

No, I just replied too quickly. I was imagining a smelter consuming 3.2 ore, which struck me as funny. Should have thought before I posted, I suppose

[Serenity]

15 items/s fits really nicely with some of the most common recipes:
Green Circuits: 10 AM2 for a yellow belt (clearly superior to the current 9). Or 6 AM3 with 8 beacons and modules for 2 blue belts. With a 12 beacon design you can almost get 2 belts out of 4 machines
Plastic: 6 refineries for a yellow belt. Less neat with 8 beacons though, as 3 now slightly underproduces
Blue Circuits: 20 AM2 consume 2 yellow belts of green circuits

[Uristqwerty]

Trying to detect full throughput with read mode is now completely impossible, since you will never notice stutter in a constant value - whereas before you could look at the fluctuations and decide upon those (not pretty but possible).

Would watching for "read mode's been stable for at least X seconds AND has received a pulse in the last Y" be harder than trying to determine it from fluctuation alone at the old rate?