Version 0.18.7

[Schallfalke]

I understand most players (those not using my mods) never have this problem since they do not release poison cloud at this scale. But I wonder why the poison goo can kill UPS so quickly?

I wonder too. Can you save the game when it's happening and share the save here?

Here it goes.
It is not needed to download all those in mod list.
Just Schall Tank Platoon for the Poison Bomb (rocket ammo), and Schall Ammo Turrets for the Rocket Turret.
Maybe also Creative Mod (though broken in 0.18.7/0.18.8) to feed the ammo infinitely.
Other mods are irrelevant for this.

I enabled all of my "Schall"-brand mods, and still got 60 UPS on battlefield screen of my megabase save in 0.18.6.

But when updated to 0.18.7, the battlefield screen drops to 20-25 UPS.

Do you mean FPS or are you really referring to UPS?

Okay, I read carefully when 1/3 way into the poison goo screen:

Code: Select all

FPS/UPS = 8.4/29.8

So 29.8 UPS, the FPS is even worse.
When goo vanish, it resumes to 60.0/60.0.

[posila]

I see. I recommend you to mod back the old visuals as using multiple sprites per cloud is not gonna work well for your use case.

[Schallfalke]

I see. I recommend you to mod back the old visuals as using multiple sprites per cloud is not gonna work well for your use case.

Alright.
It is a sad news though. So wanted to stick my everything to vanilla game as much as possible.

A new question to reuse the old poison cloud though.
Is there anything I can to the lower the poison clouds to some layer, so they will not obscure the units and entities like the new visual?

[ptx0]

I see. I recommend you to mod back the old visuals as using multiple sprites per cloud is not gonna work well for your use case.

Alright.
It is a sad news though. So wanted to stick my everything to vanilla game as much as possible.

A new question to reuse the old poison cloud though.
Is there anything I can to the lower the poison clouds to some layer, so they will not obscure the units and entities like the new visual?

fwiw I tested your save on my Ryzen 3700x with Vega 56 on Linux 5.3.6 and it hits 10FPS and 44 UPS here, fairly usable though it would probably be crippled if it were anything more substantial, in case you were curious (I was).

it seems like Creative Mod is eating up a fair amount of update time there.

[Schallfalke]

I see. I recommend you to mod back the old visuals as using multiple sprites per cloud is not gonna work well for your use case.

Alright.
It is a sad news though. So wanted to stick my everything to vanilla game as much as possible.

A new question to reuse the old poison cloud though.
Is there anything I can to the lower the poison clouds to some layer, so they will not obscure the units and entities like the new visual?

fwiw I tested your save on my Ryzen 3700x with Vega 56 on Linux 5.3.6 and it hits 10FPS and 44 UPS here, fairly usable though it would probably be crippled if it were anything more substantial, in case you were curious (I was).

Thanks for the test.
As par posila's advice, I would make a new update tomorrow (too late for me now). This performance drop is too much.
Perhaps also on Schall Artillery, since the Poison artillery shell is also releasing vanilla poison capsule.
I would need to make my own poison capsule and poison cloud.

In one of my mod that I am developing, the poison cloud will be released in an even larger scale... So it cannot use the fancy new visuals anyway...

it seems like Creative Mod is eating up a fair amount of update time there.

True, it is well-known. It actually leads to some modders to develop some alternatives.
But yes, I am a bit too attached to it for my mod testing environment...

I don't use this cheat mod for normal gameplay though. So not a big deal to me.

[TeZwo]

Factorio great overall like everytime, but .. but
this time i don't like some of these new sounds.

Placing a building, was sounds really pounded. Now it sounds like I'm putting something out of paper. No bass in there. No matter if assambler or i placed a splitter. Overall there are some great sounds and some really bad sounds.

But i like the sound of the train drives on the track.

[Philip017]

RE: new sounds

I will revisit this again once all the new sounds have been worked out.

but there is still a lot of work that needs adjusting as far as my experience has been, the offshore pumps are overly loud, the nuke heat pipes are also too loud, the assemblers are very mute, the belts are static noise and not at all as appealing as previous versions.

trains sounds are now only plain o static, it would be so much nicer, if they sounded like trains clanking on tracks with a loud diesel engine, the old sound was pretty good, just lacking some of the true clanking on tracks sounds, adding a mod for the trains to honk when stopping and starting seems like a natural inclusion to vanilla train sounds.

the new robot sounds are meh, sometimes they are interesting but most of the time they are mute, at least the old sounds were consistent and unique.

i sincerely hope that your sound technician will make more unique sounds to entities and not have everything sound like static when mixed together.

[ptx0]

Factorio great overall like everytime, but .. but
this time i don't like some of these new sounds.

Placing a building, was sounds really pounded. Now it sounds like I'm putting something out of paper. No bass in there. No matter if assambler or i placed a splitter. Overall there are some great sounds and some really bad sounds.

But i like the sound of the train drives on the track.

putting down large landfill with headphones on at a normal volume caused me to immediately throw them away from my head due to the insane noise of all those entities plopping down at once. never again. sounds disabled now.

[posila]

A new question to reuse the old poison cloud though.
Is there anything I can to the lower the poison clouds to some layer, so they will not obscure the units and entities like the new visual?

There is SmokeWithTrigger::render_layer, so you can set it to a layer under normal objects (see list of layers here https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/RenderLayer) ... but you won't be able to achieve the effect of grounded fog. It's either gonna be on top of them, under them and if you set it to "object" layer, north half will cover entities, and bottom half will be under entities.

[Schallfalke]

A new question to reuse the old poison cloud though.
Is there anything I can to the lower the poison clouds to some layer, so they will not obscure the units and entities like the new visual?

There is SmokeWithTrigger::render_layer, so you can set it to a layer under normal objects (see list of layers here https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/RenderLayer) ... but you won't be able to achieve the effect of grounded fog. It's either gonna be on top of them, under them and if you set it to "object" layer, north half will cover entities, and bottom half will be under entities.

Thanks for the info. Now using "lower-object-above-shadow" and it covers the ground items (loot). But still show spawners, live aliens and dead bodies clearly.
Not as nice as the new 0.18.7 visuals, but fine enough for me.
EDIT: Added a screenshot showing the result.

Poison cloud using "lower-object-above-shadow"

PoisonCloudLayer.png (270.13 KiB) Viewed 8083 times

[R3vo]

3. There seems to be no volume normalization
Some of the new sounds are super loud and others are super quiet (eg. super loud offshore pump vs assemblers I can barely hear anymore). It may be the case that there are supposed to be louder sounds for louder entities in real life, but this is not how sound design is supposed to be done in a game. In Factorio the sounds that are more important for the player feedback are supposed to be louder

20200219190141_1.jpg (496.79 KiB) Viewed 8052 times

I think this images shows very well that something is off with the volume normalization. Ideally, those slider default values should be at 50 % and from there the user can tweak them. Right now it's a mess and I can't tell if I changed values previously or not because the default values are all over the place.

[Mernom]

Personally, I stopped using creative mode for testing. Editor mode is way better in most cases. And it can be enabled easily.

[ptx0]

Personally, I stopped using creative mode for testing. Editor mode is way better in most cases. And it can be enabled easily.

Creative mode and Creative Mod are two different things, which one are you referring to? but yeah, the editor is awesome.

[Schallfalke]

it seems like Creative Mod is eating up a fair amount of update time there.

True, it is well-known. It actually leads to some modders to develop some alternatives.
But yes, I am a bit too attached to it for my mod testing environment...
...

Just did a look about the update time used by Creative Mod.

It is somehow too broad to say the WHOLE mod using the update time.
Now I actually found the presence of item generation/void chests are the real UPS killers.

Then I removed that mod, and use the hidden vanilla "infinite-chest", "infinite-pipe". Guess what?
They are also UPS killers, comparable to those in Creative Mod.

So I would say it is the on_tick event (or alternative events, if any) for checking/generating items in those special chests being responsible to use of update time.
Unless those on_tick events are done much less often, there will be UPS hit, regardless if you are using vanilla infinite chest or Creative Mod duplicating/void chest.

Maybe some alternative mods are performing those checks less frequently. But I have not tested them so I would not comment yet.

[invisus]

I think this images shows very well that something is off with the volume normalization. Ideally, those slider default values should be at 50 % and from there the user can tweak them. Right now it's a mess and I can't tell if I changed values previously or not because the default values are all over the place.

I fully well agree with this. But will note that with the new GUI, if you had modified any of the levels, the Reset button in the top right would be brighter, and when hovered over, should highlight the modified levels.

Personally, I stopped using creative mode for testing. Editor mode is way better in most cases. And it can be enabled easily.

Maybe some alternative mods are performing those checks less frequently. But I have not tested them so I would not comment yet.

I feel like dropping https://mods.factorio.com/mod/EditorExtensions in here so someone that knows more about such things can give it a go.

[Solinya]

2. Action feedback is becoming worse
Because the sounds all sound fairly equal now, a player gets much less feedback for the actions he does. I do not notice if a laser turret fires anymore because if sounds basically the same as belts. Bots have similar sounds to the entity destroyed alert, so every time i pass a bot, i think my factory gets attacked.

I wanted to emphasize this point. If the factory sounds are being updated to be more realistic, that's fine, but key game-effecting sounds need to stand out. The entity destroyed alert is one of the most crucial noises because it means "hey, your stuff is getting wrecked!" It should be loud, attention-grabbing, and adrenaline-inducing precisely because it's not a sound you want to hear and you should take steps to avoid situations that trigger it. It also needs to stand out.

Starting with 0.18, I have barely been able to notice the entity destroyed sound. Not when I'm losing 20 objects at once on wave defense, certainly not when I stupidly forget to disable my roboport when driving a tank into a biter swarm and lose my construction robots in combat. And if not for the flashing graphic (which can blend in if you have lots of logistic or programmable speaker alerts firing), I probably wouldn't have noticed an expansion wave was beating up on an outpost.

I could hear all of those with the 0.17 entity destroyed sound, even losing bots while combat sounds were going off all around me in multiplayer.

To a lesser extent, the same should be true of lasers and other combat noises. I should be able to tell when a laser turret is firing nearby because that's a rare event (I aggressively control pollution and clear out biter nests).

While there are some improvements to the sound redesign (I made some callouts in the 18.3 thread), I think player feedback is one area that has suffered, and I hope you reconsider some of these key noises.

[Oktokolo]

Yeah! I waited for get_insertable_count(). But the improved visuals and fixes are a nice bonus too.

[Llama]

Just before 0.18 came out I was thinking how far the rest of the game had progressed, and how the audio could do with some overhauling... my favourite bit has been how the sounds are more audible when zoomed out, because I spend a lot of time like that and it was lonely in a silent environment. The 0.18 destroyed entity "bing" doesn't make a lot of sense, but I like being immersed in more humming belts, assemblers and pipes. I haven't tried 0.18.7 yet but I agree with what was said where lasers should be more pronounced and exciting, and auditory feedback could be better. For example IRL when a train is coming the rails will chirp in advance and hundreds of tons of steel will charge past, in Factorio they quietly go "shh" in a very reserved manner. More assertive sounds needed, where appropriate.

[Yezpahr]

Personally I never use auto-update on any software, never have. Go to great lengths to avoid it.

I'm with you, I go to great lengths too to avoid auto-update of most programs.
But, could you tell me how you disabled Steam's auto-update for this game?

I cannot disable it at all... the option is just not there.
Available options: 'always', 'only when I launch the game', 'always + high priority (update before other games)'
Also, I can't seem to disable the experimental beta channel for this game... I mean, I can *see* the option, I can change it, but when re-opening that same window I come to the conclusion it didn't really switch.

Meh, in any way, I was jumping to conclusions that it was the dev's fault... the blame on that particular moment was Steam's own update which corrupted a couple of games of mine and also bricked a few other games completely (._. ) ... thanks Steam..


Steam .... just makes me hot sometimes, no pun intended.

[MakeItGraphic]

Personally I never use auto-update on any software, never have. Go to great lengths to avoid it.

I'm with you, I go to great lengths too to avoid auto-update of most programs.
But, could you tell me how you disabled Steam's auto-update for this game?

I cannot disable it at all... the option is just not there.
Available options: 'always', 'only when I launch the game', 'always + high priority (update before other games)'
Also, I can't seem to disable the experimental beta channel for this game... I mean, I can *see* the option, I can change it, but when re-opening that same window I come to the conclusion it didn't really switch.

Meh, in any way, I was jumping to conclusions that it was the dev's fault... the blame on that particular moment was Steam's own update which corrupted a couple of games of mine and also bricked a few other games completely (._. ) ... thanks Steam..


Steam .... just makes me hot sometimes, no pun intended.

You have to edit the appmanifest file for Factorio. But I don't use steam, and I usually just have a network toggle I use to avoid stuff like that along with MB-WFC.