Friday Facts #227 - Rendering, Trees & Scenario talk

[Loewchen]

was that the one where you control tanja? in the building? <3

I don't remember it that well anymore It's over 20 years after all. Little as I recall it was some rescue mission with just soldiers.

This is the one with Tanya

[PadreSperanza]

I really would love a scenario-section "mysteries".

I like to solve puzzles and puzzle games. And Factorio just has the potential to crate these. What do I mean by this?

Give the player an amout of items/buildings and limited ressources and a goal like 100 iron plates, an Assambling machine and some pdorducitivity mudules III and a lot of other stuff which is not needed. The task is to create 75 iron gears out of them. The player now needs to try his best to reach the goal. And after finishing level 1, he unlocked level 2. In that level the difficultness will increase. Level by level it's increased a little to have more option to use to get a new goal while you really need to think about how to realize.
So begin with obvious stuff like creating 100 Iron Plates and go on all items you can find in Factorio. So you can learn much more about the game itself, the items in it and the way you may can optimize these things. And on the other hand other players can show their creations and compete against each other. But they can compete without frustraition. Beacause Factorio is a game where 1000000 ways will lead to the goal. Every one on its own
This would be pretty cool and challenging and somehow a little mind blowing.
Your Belt-Race was something I really really liked and enjoyed. And this would be great too, because there are some conditions you have to deal with to create something really really big <3

[Engimage]

I am mostly with Koub here.
I know this is just my opinion but I really hate the idea of PvP (combat) in Factorio.
I do like Multiplayer as it is plain awesome to play with friends. I do play with my son as well to coach him and increase his feeling of safety while biters are on.
Competetive play is fine (production challenge) but I still find it as a minor audience for the game.

However different kinds of puzzles in scenarios would be really awesome. One great example would be "fixing" partially broken bases. Like there is a base which should output 100 items/min but currently it does only 50. You should find the problem and solve it using minimal resources.

And ofcourse I do expect proper campaign. This is something the game lacks badly.

As for scenarios I am sure community will come up with them as soon as you give them tools for it. Go for Map Editor and scenario scripting tools and eventually you will have a lot of those.

[PadreSperanza]

However different kinds of puzzles in scenarios would be really awesome. One great example would be "fixing" partially broken bases. Like there is a base which should output 100 items/min but currently it does only 50. You should find the problem and solve it using minimal resources.

yes this is exactly what I would love too. I haven'T got the idea of fixing broken bases but this sounds great too. Puzzles are the way to increase the fun about this game to spent much more hours then wie already did.
Devs please go on and give us such those things and we won't stop play ever and ever again. (And ofcourse update those puzzle time by time )

[geisteskranker]

Asteroid

Before you crash on the asteroid the computer tells us the asteroid will also crash and to get help we need to send in * h the rocket.
Everything is desert.
A lot of cliffs.
And no trees!!! (Like that you are longer whiteout power).
No aliens (I thing is hard enough).
Also because the asteroid is moving the sunlight is changing.
So on day you have just 2h light and next days you have 20h light.
Ore is a lot available.
Awesome would be also if the asteroid is limited (Map Size)


They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

By the way
thank you for this awesome game!!!

[mrvn]

You mention the use of mipmaps. The big benefit of them is that you can quickly draw items at any scale at O(pixels) cost because any expensive scaling and anti aliasing and such is done beforehand. The cost though is twice the memory.

In factorio you only draw things at one scale at a time. It's true that you can zoom out and in but that is more or less infrequent.

So I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to keep a full sprite atlas in main memory and scale it to the current zoom factor and only put that into VRAM. Then when you zoom in or out you use the GPU to scale on the fly for maybe a second or two and then scale the full sprite atlas to the zoom factor and copy it into VRAM again.

The delay in regenerating the zoomed sprite atlas would be to prevent the scaling overhead while zooming or for a quick zoom out, look around, zoom back in. The scaling could still use a mipmap so it should be fast. Another benefit would also that zoomed out all sprites would be smaller. The atlas shrinks and the GPU might be able to better handle all the sprites without having to swap textures all the time.

[RocketManChronicles]

In PvP, it would be great to have a customizable option to set the distance between players.

Err there is one. It's called "Distance between teams". It's like the first option of the list : https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/k_EGb ... w1920-h949

Your link does not work. And we are unable to find this option. Please elaborate so we can start our next map!

[Klonan]

In PvP, it would be great to have a customizable option to set the distance between players.

Err there is one. It's called "Distance between teams". It's like the first option of the list : https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/k_EGb ... w1920-h949

Your link does not work. And we are unable to find this option. Please elaborate so we can start our next map!

[Drury]

- Full PvP : Almost can't express how much I hate it and the "this is wrong" feeling I get. It makes me feel as if given real weapons and encouraged to fight other people until there is only one left. I have seen incredible frustration induced rage with PvP, and it seems to encourage the emergence of the worst behaviours in some people. It has always been the source of immense incomprehension seeing how much people seem to love fighting each others when I see what games have the most success : All the grat FPSes have been played so much more for their pvp content than for their solo content. Loog at PUBG's success. I just cannot understand what draws people to this, it's way beyond any hope of comprehension for me (but I understand and accept that others have pleasures that differ from mine, and respect their difference as long as I don't have to endure the same).

Competitive PvP games are brainwashing our children and they must be stopped.

[Elok]

Just one little details a lot of people here seems to miss :

PvP scenario doesn't mean combat between players!

PvP mode simply add a "lot" of additional option of multiplayer, PvP being "one" of them.

It allow multiple team of any number of player to start on their own in their own isolated place on the map. It's very nice to start far but eventually build a train tracks to join both team so we can visit each other's bases

[Gergely]

Competitive PvP games are brainwashing our children and they must be stopped.

Explain it. Seriously, what is wrong with competitive games? Almost all real-world non electronic games are competitive. All PC online multiplayer games (to my knowledge) have at least one competitive game mode. And then they are bad?!

[Drury]

Competitive PvP games are brainwashing our children and they must be stopped.

Explain it. Seriously, what is wrong with competitive games? Almost all real-world non electronic games are competitive. All PC online multiplayer games (to my knowledge) have at least one competitive game mode. And then they are bad?!

No, they are absolutely abhorrent and people cannot have fun in them. Fact.

[brunzenstein]

Competitive PvP games are brainwashing our children and they must be stopped.

Explain it. Seriously, what is wrong with competitive games? Almost all real-world non electronic games are competitive. All PC online multiplayer games (to my knowledge) have at least one competitive game mode. And then they are bad?!

No, they are absolutely abhorrent and people cannot have fun in them. Fact.

I sign that!

[bobingabout]

Personally, when a multiplayer game has a PvP side, I typically stay away from it. co-op or no play.

Games like TF2 (Could never get into that one specifically) can be fun for a bit, but losing constantly (usually not because you're bad at it, but because your internet can't handle the real-time action, and you constantly get instantaneous death from someone who isn't even anywhere near you) just isn't fun.

And yes, the player who teleports around the map because of a bad connection is still a thing, I play warframe, and every now and then you land on an unsuitable connection where enemies are statues, doors won't open, and death just happens instantly and at random. that's annoying enough, and it's not even PvP.

[Drury]

I like PvP games because trying to find a way to beat the other guy who's trying to find a way to beat you so you have to know how he's going to do that so you can beat him and he doesn't beat you is like

ＮＩＣＥ

And it's different each time and there's always that one guy who's better at beating you than you are at beating him so you try to learn how he beat you so you can beat him next time but he knows you're going to be doing that so he beats you differently but you now know to watch out for those mindgames so you can prevent him from beating you next time

PvE is kinda lacks this dimension. You kinda just use prebaked strategies that work for each specific challenge the game throws at you until it gets boring and you start doing weird challenges like speedruns to fill the void (which by the way are a type of PvP).

[Jap2.0]

They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

Copyright infringement anyone ?

[brunzenstein]

They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

Copyright infringement anyone ?

We could crash with the starship on the water
In a scenario like Waterworld

[RocketManChronicles]

They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

Copyright infringement anyone ?

LOL! This is already in the vanilla Factorio game! Setup a Deathworld map. Change terrain settings to have only water in starting area. Set minimum attack group size to 20 (max) and set maximum group size to 50 (max). Change minimum attack time to 1 or 2 minutes. Change Maximum attack time to 3 or 4 minutes. Good luck!

[mrvn]

They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

Copyright infringement anyone ?

LOL! This is already in the vanilla Factorio game! Setup a Deathworld map. Change terrain settings to have only water in starting area. Set minimum attack group size to 20 (max) and set maximum group size to 50 (max). Change minimum attack time to 1 or 2 minutes. Change Maximum attack time to 3 or 4 minutes. Good luck!

Or simply play the waves scenario.

[Jap2.0]

They Are Billions. (Tower Defends)

We crash on an overpopulated Planted whit Aliens.
The explosion was so big that the Surroundings is completely wiped out.
Exactly on the crash point is the only water.
We need it, and the aliens want it back.
The attack every 30 minutes whit bigger army. (Counter shown)
On beginning just 2, and after a few hours They Are Billions
A lot of resources expect water (just small lake on crash point).

Copyright infringement anyone ?

LOL! This is already in the vanilla Factorio game! Setup a Deathworld map. Change terrain settings to have only water in starting area. Set minimum attack group size to 20 (max) and set maximum group size to 50 (max). Change minimum attack time to 1 or 2 minutes. Change Maximum attack time to 3 or 4 minutes. Good luck!

I was thinking more of the timed wave attacks, and more precicely calling it "they are billions". And making it an offical thing.

As mrvn pointed out, this is basically in the game already, just without the copyright infrigement.

Legal note: I have no idea what I'm talking about.