Friday Facts #323 - Animated water

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-323

[Gergely]

Is it just me, or was the water always somewhat animated in the game?

It's probably just me.

But apart from biters and the factory, nothing else moves in this Factorio planet.

Yeah it's just me and what might have been some lighter optical illusion. Apart from fish of course.

[ggrnd0]

IS it possible to make flowing islands?

[CreeperDaReeper]

Hmmm......
Imagines reservoirs of Oil that have leaked up to the surface, rivers of Lava winding through the terrain, and churning pools of Acid nearby.

[Drury]

Is that a hint of tree sway that I read between those lines?

[torham]

Hmmm......
Imagines reservoirs of Oil that have leaked up to the surface, rivers of Lava winding through the terrain, and churning pools of Acid nearby.

Awesome!!. And, and... since we are talking environment how about dust storms in the desert, or dust devils...

.... rain (wake up your inner pluviophile)

Edit: Also, the water looks amzing

[meganothing]

Is it me or is the effect much more visible and faster in picture 4 than in picture 1? For me the picture 1 version looks a bit too subtle and unnaturally slow.

[TOGoS]

The reflections are what makes it look super cool. I want more details about how that works! Even if it's just: now every sprite has a reflected version that masked by the reflection texture. But can any tile do reflection?

[DanGio]

This is really nice. Maybe, maybe, it's too beautiful and water colors should be desaturated to look more "neutral", less eye-catching. But without testing it live, it's hard to say for sure.

[posila]

The reflections are what makes it look super cool. I want more details about how that works! Even if it's just: now every sprite has a reflected version that masked by the reflection texture. But can any tile do reflection?

Oh, hey! It's very crude. Entities can have reflection sprites, which are very low res and are rendered into the RGB map Ernestas showed in one of his animations. So they don't have any color information of their own, but could make water foam. In general, other tiles can't reflect.

[Kostriktor]

it says you put effort into making everything look credible !
then why are the ore-colors inverted ?
i read the update where you make the trees of fancy colors etc, and its sad, it took away from the dark-tone Factorio always had.
why does every game trying to look like call of duty ?

Factorio is the best game, no matter how it looks, anyways !

[mrvn]

Is it just me, or was the water always somewhat animated in the game?

It's probably just me.

But apart from biters and the factory, nothing else moves in this Factorio planet.

Yeah it's just me and what might have been some lighter optical illusion. Apart from fish of course.

Water reflects clouds and clouds move. Turn off clods and water becomes still.

[Peregrin_Tooc]

Very nice, looking forward to seeing it in the game And yes, a little wind swaying the trees or raising a little dust in the desert would be awesome. Also, dust when driving through the desert with any vehicle would give a nice feeling

[mrvn]

The moving water looks like wind is causing waves, kind off. But that makes it realy noticable that trees are static.

So while I think the effect is a good start it really needs animated trees as well. Keep at it.

[bleistift2]

Personally, I never thought about the stillness of the environment. Maybe because everything that I usually interact with (machines) does move. I find it strange, however, that the water flow changes direction every few seconds.

[Cgeta]

Ooh boy!
Atmospheric details
I really love how the water looks. And I really look forward to the sound of it!

One thing I have always been a huge fan of, and I hope you'll add aswell, is animated trees! And possibly animated bushes. Leaves rustling in the wind, the sound of that is so relaxing. And it makes the impact all that bigger when it's gone as all the trees in the vincinity of your factory are dead

[TheBrain0110]

Personally, I never thought about the stillness of the environment. Maybe because everything that I usually interact with (machines) does move. I find it strange, however, that the water flow changes direction every few seconds.

I agree. Moving water is nice, but sloshing around randomly is kinda weird.

As the last few posters mentioned, it looks like the waves should be caused by the wind. We currently have clouds that move by, and the smoke from our machines (especially noticeable on turbines) changes direction slowly with the wind too. It would be great if there was a single unified wind direction (and maybe even speed) for all of those - clouds, smoke, waves, and trees, etc - to all move together. That would really give a sense of a coherent living environment.

Then of course you’d need a dynamic weather model to have the wind shift in a realistic pattern...

And if we’re going *really* crazy, you could even have the diffusion of the pollution cloud affected by the wind direction / speed.

Ok actually the *most* over the top thing would be to have the pollution cloud affect the weather itself!
Climate Change DLC for post-1.0 maybe? :p

[Hiladdar]

It looks nice, but I concur with the game performance concerns on legacy computers.

Hiladdar

[PaszaVonPomiot]

I really like the idea of calmly moving waters. Proper sound effects would do wonders in combination with those animations. The same for trees

[eradicator]

There is still no plan to support custom shader definitions before 1.0.

That sounds more promising to me than it probably is :D.