A couple of things about the nuke animation: It looks like not only spread speed, but also decay was slowed down for particles moving vertically. Resulting in crescents which are over-emphasized. If you already have a core damage zone, then you should maintain the mushroom cloud for a couple more se...

There was the suspicion that we brought the server into that state by use of excessively sized blueprints. An issue I could observe as player was that using an upgrade planer to upgrade more than 256 entities (all of them same type) in a single drag&drop action resulted in instant disconnect for...

What stuck with me in the old campaign, and that I can remember vividly even now, was coming across a ruined factory. There were still a number of buildings standing, but power was dead and a lot of the assembly line had been destroyed. That type of hand-holding is great for some players, who like ...

Now take 32 bits for ID (not 64B for a pointer), 18 bits for X and Y, and 4 bits for state, so 9 bytes for entity. That means 7 entities per cache line, 15 lines in total. Profit. That math is far off, unfortunately. Unpacking bit-packed structures like that is not free. Especially not if placed on...

I speak about linear memory, not about pointers. But you still don't get any "smart" memory layout for them, usually just a heap per type. No such grouping or clustering as you suggested. Why not? I don't understand. You can have any number of forks grouped according different access rule...

I speak about linear memory, not about pointers. So did I. Except you don't replicate data back to the main entity. Once it's forked off to a component, data is stored only in that component and no longer directly embedded in the owning entity. Said isolated components exist in linear memory with o...

When talking about parallelization, if the tasks are indeed independent, why would they be competing for memory access? Because memory access is the bottleneck. [...] I have an idea. Entities could have duplicated data: one regular structure for all entity data, and reduced copy containing only few...

https://i.imgur.com/AHd8pPt.png In other words, the pixels near the edge of sprites seem randomly scattered, and within the sprite frame-to-frame movement also results in a lot of random scattering of individual pixels, as opposed to smooth movement of larger regions. This phenomenon is both ugly a...

A lot of testing later and the results were correct; it was just that much faster. The underlying algorithm didn't change but it just ran > 3x faster now by touching less memory. This is another nice example of "Factorio is not CPU bound, it's memory latency bound". More cores wasn't goin...

Yea it's a 2D game, so... So? Filtering the sprite into outline is happening in 2D as well. Except the used filter kernel is a constant width one regardless of distance to sprite base, which is causing it to look weird. If the reflected part is far from the water, it should be reflected with a lowe...

Shadows on the water ... I don't think I ever realized they are there, but now that the water is moving, they pop out. And they are neither subject to a blur, nor are they distorted by a noise function. Can't really paint them on top of the water like that. They can suppress highlights on the water,...

This indicates you might have a configuration problem with your monitor [...] or your display's transfer characteristics might be favoring light values and not giving enough bits to darker values. Spot on... the monitor had shifted to game profile with a weird transfer function increasing hue. Back...

I agree that map doesn't need much contrast between biomes, because differences between them are not that important for the gameplay. Orientation. I don't actually care much either what the individual biomes are (surprise!), but I primarily recognize where I am on the map based on the shape of the ...

I admit, I hadn't even thought about it from the perspective of artists and modders, and there I admit I agree... It's only more convenient to use matrix math for weirdos like me who get giddy with excitement about being able to apply arbitrary colorspace conversions on things. For everyone else, a...

All the loader mods which actually use the loader entity haven't bypassed anything. They inherit everything from the basic loader prototype that was abandoned over a year ago but oddly made it into the campaign. There is one exception with a mod which presents the player with a thing which looks li...

This breaks a fundamental rule that was decided back in FFF-128 when Loaders were being considered. This rule is that there is only one way to move items between structures, by using Inserters. Even though the items were never actually transferred, and our intent was that the Loader consumes them, ...

Is there any specific plan to address the unstable Z order issues, which became even more prominent after increasing the belt density? As nice as it looks on a straight piece, in corners, or on tiles adjacent to corners, you quickly notice the order shifting. With now randomized variations, you are ...

Balance bots vs belts (not a fair comparison btw., you would also need to consider the footprint required for 4MW of power production, and the fact that you can effectively interweave 3 blue + 2 (or 1?) red belts in just 2 tiles), and the cost effectiveness of the research are just two points to con...

How much more throughput do you think logistics mots should have? Double? 500%? 20 000%? Just tell me what you think is a reasonable number and we can discuss that first. No point in discussing how to achieve it if we have no decided goal for how strong these throughput buffs should be. Aren't you ...

At the beginning, one robot can fly 83.3s before needing a recharge. Every 1.5s, I can refill 4 logibots with a roboport, so during that 83.3s flight, one roboport can manage at most (83.3/1.5)x4 = 222 robots without them queuing for recharge. Now let's say I have infinite tech 5 (worker speed 10)....