[No longer available] Old graphics

[dood]

Has anyone tried making bots that appear like they travel on the ground yet?
That would be suitably low-tech. Maybe instead of a handful of slow, floating bots, you have fast ones zipping around like cockroaches but you can only have 1-2.
It would be unique.

You have almost no control over their animations, it's hard-coded. You could move the shadow closer and move them lower but you can't change the way they bob up and down or the way they appear to shrink and drop into your inventory or a roboport from above. You can't change the rendering layer either, so if you shifted them and their shadow to look vaguely like they're on the floor, they'd destroy perspective and look very bad when they moved over buildings. You also can't control which bots get the effect of upgrades, so your fast bots would become insanely fast when you got to movement speed research, and you can't stop them from being used in vanilla roboports so they'd just end up as a massive buff over actual bots. You can only control the number of active bots indirectly, i.e. by limiting equipment and roboport capacity. Not a lot of scope here.

I suppose that also means you can't have multiple kinds of bots then.
Like, bronze and steel ones?
What about their progression then? You gonna switch graphics at different tiers of research?

[Deadlock989]

You can, it just means that bots introduced early game must be inherently worse than the bots you get late game.

But I don't really see the need to introduce a whole scheme of tiers of bots, one of Factorio's rare weaknesses is a lack of any kind of bot management once they are loose in your system - replacing 1000 iron bots with steel bots once they're loose across your roboport network would be a massive pain in the neck. This is just so that there is an early blueprint building mechanism available, and that's all. Early tier 4, you'll switch to using vanilla bots and actual roboports. There won't be bronze logistics bots, either. People can use Nanobots or Tinystart or whatever if they prefer but it would be nice to have something built in that fits the style, and I got carried away when I saw a winged helmet. I'm not going to town on this, I'm a belt person, but like lots of other people, I think you should have access to construction blueprints much much earlier than vanilla allows.

[Deadlock989]

[removed]

[Deadlock989]

Has anyone tried to use the train logic to make smaller "carts" that would work like little mini bots on the ground, burning coal and going down narrow gauge tracks?

I don't know if this possible. My gut instinct says it isn't, but I haven't really delved into trains or tracks so I'm not sure.

It would be awesome to have belt-width rails with tiny minecarts on them. You might not even need belts any more. But even if you could have them (and I'm 75% sure you can't), you'd never be able to get away from the built-in logic of trains, i.e. a train can't have an inventory as such, only wagons can, so you'd need tiny trains to pull the tiny carts, and tiny signals, and tiny stations that they travel to.

[mrvn]

Has anyone tried to use the train logic to make smaller "carts" that would work like little mini bots on the ground, burning coal and going down narrow gauge tracks?

I don't know if this possible. My gut instinct says it isn't, but I haven't really delved into trains or tracks so I'm not sure.

It would be awesome to have belt-width rails with tiny minecarts on them. You might not even need belts any more. But even if you could have them (and I'm 75% sure you can't), you'd never be able to get away from the built-in logic of trains, i.e. a train can't have an inventory as such, only wagons can, so you'd need tiny trains to pull the tiny carts, and tiny signals, and tiny stations that they travel to.

Maybe don't think trains with tiny carts. Instead think belts with carts on it.

You know how you can put a car on a belt and have inserters put stuff into the trunk? Make the cart a 1x1 car that can't be driven and place it on a belt. Now if only we could stop the inserters from putting stuff onto belts where no car is? Maybe put invisible carts on the belt with 0 trunk size when there is no real cart?
Or make smaller belts that have the place where inserters put stuff when no cart is present blocked.

[Deadlock989]

Yeah, no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU676kMBrNI

[McDuff]

So the "car/cart" would just stop when it was being loaded? Bummer.

[dood]

Is there no way to unify regular smelters with alloy smelters?
It's very confusing to have 2 visually similar sets of smelters.
Maybe make the bar recipe 2 ores for 2 bars to account for the 2 slots or something?

[Deadlock989]

Is there no way to unify regular smelters with alloy smelters?
It's very confusing to have 2 visually similar sets of smelters.
Maybe make the bar recipe 2 ores for 2 bars to account for the 2 slots or something?

If there were a way, do you not think I would have done it? Furnace recipes can only have one ingredient and one result. Any other number of ingredients or results and it has to be an assembler-type where you select a recipe. Alloys by definition are a mixture of more than one thing, so this is the way it has to be, unless you want everyone to pick a recipe for every single furnace recipe as well.

Like I mysteriously didn't opt for house-sized inserters?

Is it really "very confusing"? Like, very very, or perhaps just a little bit?

[mrvn]

So the "car/cart" would just stop when it was being loaded? Bummer.

No, in the video the "car/cart" stops because it hits the gate. You could also circuit control the belt to stop the cart.

[mrvn]

Is there no way to unify regular smelters with alloy smelters?
It's very confusing to have 2 visually similar sets of smelters.
Maybe make the bar recipe 2 ores for 2 bars to account for the 2 slots or something?

If there were a way, do you not think I would have done it? Furnace recipes can only have one ingredient and one result. Any other number of ingredients or results and it has to be an assembler-type where you select a recipe. Alloys by definition are a mixture of more than one thing, so this is the way it has to be, unless you want everyone to pick a recipe for every single furnace recipe as well.

Like I mysteriously didn't opt for house-sized inserters?

Is it really "very confusing"? Like, very very, or perhaps just a little bit?

In Angels/Bobs it is very confusing resulting in building or placing the wrong thing far too often because all the steel furnaces have the same icon. I haven't played yours but better make sure they really do look differently.

[Deadlock989]

In Angels/Bobs it is very confusing resulting in building or placing the wrong thing far too often because all the steel furnaces have the same icon. I haven't played yours but better make sure they really do look differently.

Well, "not Angels/Bobs" is the plan, so I'll try my best, but 32x32 pixels for an icon is something of a constraint. I don't know yet what kind of numbers of alloy furnaces are going to be placed down, they certainly (probably maybe) won't be stacked in huge arrays like furnaces are. I had the exact same issues - building and placing an alloy furnace when I meant a furnace - in Minecraft with Thermal Expansion, Gregtech etc. so I'm fine with having problems so long as they come with a fashionable pedigree.

[dood]

Is there no way to unify regular smelters with alloy smelters?
It's very confusing to have 2 visually similar sets of smelters.
Maybe make the bar recipe 2 ores for 2 bars to account for the 2 slots or something?

If there were a way, do you not think I would have done it? Furnace recipes can only have one ingredient and one result. Any other number of ingredients or results and it has to be an assembler-type where you select a recipe. Alloys by definition are a mixture of more than one thing, so this is the way it has to be, unless you want everyone to pick a recipe for every single furnace recipe as well.

Like I mysteriously didn't opt for house-sized inserters?

Is it really "very confusing"? Like, very very, or perhaps just a little bit?

Very, very it is. I had to triple check to see what was going on there.
You could have deliberately opted for that to add complexity or something, I dunno. People do weird things for that.

If you have time some day, perhaps make an entirely new, distinct model for the alloy smelters.
Maybe more like a pot to melt the 2 bars in or something so there's no way to confuse them with ore smelters.

And are alloys even a thing in the stone age? Seems like a lot of complexity for what should be simple times.
Maybe you could ditch the stone alloy smelter entirely if it wasn't?

[Deadlock989]

Yeah, pretty sure bronze was a big deal when it came up.

How do you make your first ever alloy if you can't make the thing that makes it?

I'll be honest, this is a massive non-issue for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTLyXamRvk4

[Deadlock989]

I've decided that this project was a classic case of biting off more than you can chew, and it's unlikely to ever be finished - I've not been able to do much with it for a month now. My situation has changed (for the better) and I don't have as much free time as I did earlier in the year.

I did a lot of graphics work for this mod, some of it is still unfinished. I've zipped up the graphics folder as-is and attached it to the first post of this thread in case anyone else can find a use for it. It contains:

- 5 skins each for 2 different kinds of 2x2 furnace (burner and electric) with working visualisations (working vis are half the width, centred on 0,0, 1 row per machine)
- 5 skins for a 2x2 "grinder" machine (working vis ditto)
- 3 skins for 3x3 miners (1 burner, 2 electric in different speeds)
- 3 skins for 3x3 labs (1 burner, 2 electric)
- Skins for inserters
- Lots of icons in 64x64 and 32x32
- Some other sketchier stuff

There's no license attached but if you do use them, a credit would be nice, it was tens of hours of work.

Cheers

[Deadlock989]

Could a moderator please move this thread to the textures forum: viewforum.php?f=15

Thanks.

[Klonan]

Could a moderator please move this thread to the textures forum: viewforum.php?f=15

Thanks.

Done

[jessefjxm]

You made really cool models! It's a pity that your work abandoned.

[Deadlock989]

You made really cool models! It's a pity that your work abandoned.

Thanks. I may look at it again after Factorio 1.0 but probably not, so it would be nice if anyone finds a use for any of the graphics.

[nemofication]

Still wrong, but better, and seeing the whole tree at once lets you spot problems more intuitively instead of hunting through lists. Too much green here means too many dependencies on steel.

large image

If anyone's interested in how to make these, the software is called Gephi and it's for making directed network graphs.

I'm interested, I found this topic by googling "Gephi Factorio"

I wouldn't mind a step-by-step guide, this software confuses me a lot! I've been wanting to make some more sense of AngelBob and perhaps even go for a bus design if I could just visualize the requirements first!