Friday Facts #282 - 0.17 in sight

[Rea]

I LOVE THEM ALL! You are the best developers of all time. Thank you so much for all the efforts and these incessant improvements. I want also to thank to community <3

[DanGio]

Thanks for all those features. They're worth waiting. I wonder if the additional trash slots in "the hand" image are modded or if trash slots are expanded in 0.17. 20 slots would be great to have.

[Yair3231]

Hey, this had probably been asked before, but what is the "New game" in the FFF about?

[Nova]

I think it's just the "New game" interface to create and play a new map.

[Sander_Bouwhuis]

Maybe I've missed it somewhere, but how is the mod support in v0.17?

Do all current mods work out of the box? Do none of them work without an update? Something in between?

I would be DISTRAUGHT if mods no longer work in the new version!
If that's the case, could you PLEASE supply early builds to people like Angel and Bob and such?

[Serenity]

Maybe I've missed it somewhere, but how is the mod support in v0.17?

Why shouldn't it be the same as in all games? Mods need varying degrees of update work depending on how many underlying things were changed. Some will work right away just by changing a version number. Some need a bit of work. And some need a lot of work.

Bob has source access, but the mod requires an extensive rework because many core systems were changed

[Venatos]

"So for 0.17, the water 'frequency' and 'size' sliders are being replaced with 'scale' and 'coverage',"
please dont do this, ill never remember that "scale" is supposed to set how frequent lakes are..... please leave it as "frequency" or spell it out if you must "number of lakes" or something, but scale will just never get into my head.....

[G-Fiti]

Really liking the island spawn idea.

I hope the rest of the terrain also generates in a similar way.

I managed to get some island spawns in the current version, but the rest of the terrain was always very disapointing. Usually it generated and entangled mess of land strips that all were connected, no aditional islands beside the starting zone.

I havan't played the other versions, so im not sure how words generated back then.


I just wish we could control the land size as well as we could controll the water size. Let us create an island world, and not just change the ocean size until the game tries to fit too many oceans into the same general area with strips of lands in between.

[pato]

now that everything has been done, PLEASE FINALLY ADJUST BITERS!!

They have not been updated and rebalanced to endless research, Uranium Ammo, Flame Turrets and Artilleries and this makes half of the combat research obsolete!

[promarbler]

Will we be able to easily adjust the increase in the amount of ore we get from further and further sites? Right now I feel that the change is too slow which makes it rather not worthwhile to plow through biters to reach these further sites.

[RobotMark]

Could we have a robot placeholder like we do with the hand placeholder in the inventory? Blinking resource icon? Flashing robot icon?

Thinking when deconstructing trees, the robots will allocate an inventory slot for those being deconstructed.

When construction robots are used, they always have a place back in the inventory.

Probably other uses?


Actually further to this, when requesting items from logistics network, perhaps these items should automatically have a placeholder in the inventory so you always have room for what you want.

[WarpZone]

I feel like the new accumulator doesn't "show the sparks going up the tesla coils" as much as the old accumulator did. This may partly be an optical illusion caused by the timing of the sparks appearing and disappearing. Either way, I read the old sprite as the electricity "going up" when it charged and "spreading out" when it discharged.

Come to think of it, the new discharge animation feels more like the lightning arcs are tightly contained and subtly curling, and less like the electricity is exploding out in all directions and jumping around randomly, but it wasn't as noticeable as the charge animation.

This is entirely arbitrary and subjective and may have more to do with me misreading the intentions of the original tiny blurry render than anything you actually did or didn't do in the redesign, so apologies if I'm off-base by saying all this.

TL;DR: The new accumulator model looks great. The electricity, however, looks different, and the difference has to do with how it moves.

(Also, it should never look like the lightning texture is the same from one frame to the next. Do what Half-Life 1 did and randomly change the X offset of the lightning texture every frame. The shape of the lightning mesh can morph gradually, but the glowing jagged line filling that arc should constantly change.)

[Zavian]

Are blueprints and blueprint books automatically synced as individual files/directories from and to the disk?
Then I could init a Git repository there and version control all my blueprints...

Personally I'm not sure that belongs in vanilla. But I think you can probably do the export as files/directory and import into a new game with a mod, which is probably good enough for most players.

[EnerJi]

Hello! Congratulations on the impending release of 0.17.

I wanted to check in and see whether signed binaries was still the plan for 0.17 (for macOS and Windows?)

See:
viewtopic.php?t=55063

and

viewtopic.php?t=62112

Thanks!

Sorry, no signed binaries yet.

That's a shame. I've been eagerly following the development of 0.17 and was really looking forward to giving Factorio a try on macOS.

Any chance this will be added during one of the 0.17 patches?

And thanks; I appreciate the response.

[steinio]

Could we have a robot placeholder like we do with the hand placeholder in the inventory? Blinking resource icon? Flashing robot icon?

Thinking when deconstructing trees, the robots will allocate an inventory slot for those being deconstructed.

When construction robots are used, they always have a place back in the inventory.

Probably other uses?


Actually further to this, when requesting items from logistics network, perhaps these items should automatically have a placeholder in the inventory so you always have room for what you want.

You can lock an inventory slot for robots with middle mouse button.

[idgod88]

Whow whow whow, this really seems a polished game didnt think there is so much potential „in the end“ before release, really nice!

Some ideas:

For Islands: how about building real train bridges? This would seem much cooler than placing soil, then some rails in a straight line. Think about it

Also for islands: how about a teleporting machine? Either teleport yourself (or a crate, or or or) to any location. The further away, the more energy it consumes. You could kind of „charge“ it (like accumulators with a switch) for any destination, as soon as it is charged „whoooooosh“ the object or yourself is teleported there. No way back, so make sure you got everything you need at your new destination

[pleegwat]

What is going to happen to existing 0.16 maps during the upgrade? Will these keep using the old noise function after upgrade, and generate new chunks which match the old ones, or will there be sudden transitions like we've seen in the past?

[posila]

What is going to happen to existing 0.16 maps during the upgrade? Will these keep using the old noise function after upgrade, and generate new chunks which match the old ones, or will there be sudden transitions like we've seen in the past?

There will be sudden transitions like in the past.

EDIT: So TOGoS messaged me the old maps will keep using 0.16 generator (with some tweaks), so there won't be so sudden transitions as in previous map generator updates.

[Cisz]

This is great.

In addition: Humidity and "aux" - isn't that temperature? Or could it not be temperature? I immediately thought so anyway..

In additional addition: With all the changes to gfx and mapgen it seems safe to assume that the Alien Biomes Mod will not be working for a while. I'll miss my deep sands and frozen hellscapes..

[Tallinu]

Please, while you are changing the way the quickbar works, make sure that there's an easy way to drop an arbitrary desired quantity of a held item into multiple machines, especially as you run or drag your mouse across a row of them. For example, putting 10 coal into each furnace, or 15 magazines into each turret, etc...

What I mean is that currently, dropping quantities of MaxStackSize or MaxStackSize/2 into each machine is the only thing you can do easily, without a lot of tedious labor. If you want to drop 10 of something into each machine, for example, you can't just put 10 in your cursor and click multiple machines, because after your first click, the stack is immediately "refilled" all the way to MaxStackSize instead of simply taking 10 of the item out of your inventory and keeping the amount held in the cursor the same so that you can place 10 in the next machine, and the next, and so on.

This means that distributing limited or evenly-divided quantities of some item amongst multiple machines currently requires dividing the item up into multiple stacks of the correct size on your quickbar or in a chest, or turning off automatic inventory sorting and doing it there, and then opening the GUI for each machine to grab and drop each separate stack into each different machine, because if you simply pick up one of those small stacks and ctrl-click a machine the game can gather all of those stacks up into a single big stack, undoing all your careful work.

Since the quickbar is no longer going to be a place that can store items, just getting a specific number of some item into your cursor is going to be a little more difficult if you have inventory sorting on. It would be necessary to use a chest to perform your divvying-up, and you'd have to keep going back and forth from the machines to the chest to pick up the next partial stack so they don't automatically merge together in your inventory.

If the amount held in the cursor didn't change when you ctrl-click a machine, most of the tedium of this process would be eliminated. The only thing you'd have to worry about is getting the correct number in the first place, which you could do by picking up a full or half stack and then simply dropping items back into your inventory one at a time until you're left with the correct number. The fact that those items would be merged together in large stacks wouldn't matter, because ctrl-clicking a machine would not change the number held, and therefore the number of items dropped would remain the same each time you clicked.

Also, since I'm not certain exactly how the implementation would affect this kind of task: If you cannot change the amount of an item held in your cursor, because the "quantity" simply reflects the total number of that item stored in all stacks in your inventory, then it would be even more difficult. It would additionally be necessary to drop every single stack of the item in question into a chest so that their presence in your inventory would not affect the amount dropped when ctrl-clicking on a machine, and you'd still be required to divide up the quantity you want to place in the machines into equal parts and then take each partial stack out of the chest one at a time, though at least it would be possible to ctrl-click the machine instead of opening its GUI in that case (since the stack held in your cursor would be the entire quantity you were carrying of that item type).