Friday Facts #290 - Rail building changes & High-res icons

[tk0421]

Does the Icons for Assembler-3 not bother anyone else?

I mean, its logical. #1 has 1 gear. #2 has 2 gears. but the layout of #3... yeah, THOSE GEARS WONT WORK!

[Koub]

Does the Icons for Assembler-3 not bother anyone else?

Nope, you're the first in the whole universe to be bothered by such a trivial thing as interlocking gears.
btw, have you tried reading the topic ?

[5thHorseman]

All this complaining about three gears and no one mentions the utter uselessness of a single gear all by itself.

[Tricorius]

All this complaining about three gears and no one mentions the utter uselessness of a single gear all by itself.

I dunno...sometimes I just like to watch things spin.

[dee-]

Three interlocked gears you say...


(clickable link to video)

[MasterBuilder]

If the keybinding was changable; if ghost rail building could be done with Alt instead of Shift:
- You could still use Shift+R to counter-clockwise rotation.
- You could path around trees by not holding Shift.

The problem with having everything on Shift is it does too many mutually exclusive things, and thus features are lost. Add a second key to activate ghost rail planning solves the issue.

PS: I don't know if there's a keybinding setting for the ghost rail planning (Shift); I couldn't find one. But, you can change the rotation bindings to get counter-clockwise working again.
Doesn't help for making long paths around trees though.

[Light]

All this complaining about three gears and no one mentions the utter uselessness of a single gear all by itself.

I dunno...sometimes I just like to watch things spin.

Bonus points if there's also a pendulum swing.

[JustusW]

Plot Twist: The other two variants of gears ALSO DON'T WORK!!!

Look at them! Do you see a pin? No? They can't spin!!!

[Ormy]

The change to rails annoys me a LOT. I avoid destroying as much of the landscape as possible when building a factory. I love having a factory nestled in the trees. I purposely use the rail planner to plan twisty routes that avoid cliffs and trees. I assiduously avoid destroying cliffs unless I have no other real option.

When I can't avoid cliffs and trees and still have a route that isn't completely ridiculous (or have any route at all) I look around for a way to destroy as few things as possible, plan a bit of the route through there, and avoid obstacles for the entire rest of the route.

I've done surveys and watched YouTubers. Distressingly few use the rail planner much at all. And the reason isn't because they have to use shift to get obstacle destruction. The reason is that they want poles or signals placed, or multiple lines placed that are a certain distance from eachother, and things of that nature. So they instead used a fixed set of blueprint templates and stomp their way across the landscape with those, which I find to be kind of sad.

I will admit that the rail planner is a pain to use to plan sets of two (or more) parallel rails, and it would be nice if it were easier to use in that mode. And it certainly would be nice to periodically place signals or power poles along the rail path.

But the change you made is a huge step backwards. And while I think the 'literally unplayable' meme is pretty stupid, I will say that your change makes the rail planner completely useless to me. And since laboriously hand placing rail all across the landscape is also a huge pain, the removal of the feature creates a situation in which I have a choice between upgrading or using rails. Since rails are such an integral part of the game, I will simply not be upgrading.

I consider removal of this ability to be a misfeature, much like I would consider removal of 'item count' conditions at rail stops or taking way splitters. This was a terrible choice. And while I understand that the rail planner interface was complex, removal of this feature in order to simplify it wasn't the right way to go.

Additionally, this does not create parity with ghost buildings. With ghost buildings, you have to hold shift to get item destruction. Otherwise, it doesn't let you place the blueprint. That's not the same behavior as what you've done with the rail planner in which item destruction is the default behavior.

The rail planner confusion comes in with the distinction between ghost (aka rail planner) mode and item placement mode. Rails are the only thing that has a sort of 'ad-hoc' large scale 'blueprinting' ability. And so, in many ways, rail planning ghost mode is like, but also not like a blueprint placement. I don't think it's possible to make the features comparable because they are different in a couple of important ways.

This. And the solution is so simple, have a toggle in the option menu between new behaviour and old behaviour, default is new behaviour, but those of us who want the old behaviour just change one toggle in options and we're happy.

[IronCartographer]

If the keybinding was changable; if ghost rail building could be done with Alt instead of Shift:
- You could still use Shift+R to counter-clockwise rotation.
- You could path around trees by not holding Shift.

The problem with having everything on Shift is it does too many mutually exclusive things, and thus features are lost. Add a second key to activate ghost rail planning solves the issue.

PS: I don't know if there's a keybinding setting for the ghost rail planning (Shift); I couldn't find one. But, you can change the rotation bindings to get counter-clockwise working again.
Doesn't help for making long paths around trees though.

Good catch. Nice that the hotkeys are modular enough to re-allow reverse rotate despite the default conflict.

[BlueTemplar]

Wouldn't multiple versions of every icon be a huge load on vram?

No, in mipmap every downscaled texture is 4 times smaller than previous one on each step, so first is 1, 2nd is 1/4, 3rd is 1/16 etc. It's geometric progression, which sum tends to 4/3. So, storing multiple downscaled versions of each icon will just occupy roughly 33% memory of original icons, not even a half.
And i guess, icons take very small amount of ram, comparing to, for example, every frame of assembling machine animation.

Wikipedia has a great picture :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

In the case of an RGB image with three channels stored as separate planes, the total mipmap can be visualized as fitting neatly into a square area twice as large as the dimensions of the original image on each side. It also shows visually how using mipmaps requires 33% more memory.

[Vxsote]

This. And the solution is so simple, have a toggle in the option menu between new behaviour and old behaviour, default is new behaviour, but those of us who want the old behaviour just change one toggle in options and we're happy.

While I agree with some of what you quoted, I think your "simple" solution misses a big part of the point. What I took away from the FFF was that the rail building mechanism itself was too complicated, meaning both hard to maintain and hard to use. Adding another option on top of that may satisfy users that want something easier to use, but only makes the problem of maintaining the functionality worse.

I think the devs made a good decision to attempt to reduce the complexity of rail building, and did so for the right reasons. The issue that so many of us have is that the outcome of this attempt was lost functionality that we liked.

As a bit of an aside, I write software for a living (although nothing as glorious as what Wube has created), and I spend more time than I like trying to explain why some suggested fixes or features are not as simple (or maybe not even possible) as the person suggesting them is convinced that they are. So the declarative "the solution is so simple" coming from someone who isn't familiar with the code (apologies if I am mistaken on that) rubs me the wrong way.

[_alphaBeta_]

I'm not getting a maintainability vibe on this at all. We've all started building a rail the unintended way and had to correct. Seems like that was the main inconvenience they were looking to address. I think this was a smaller problem and certainly wasn't worth giving up the fully functional and well tested avoidance mode of the planner. Said planner has been around for quite a while. I think there's been plenty of use cases identified that rebuke the assertion that this mode wasn't used. We also lost the native ability to reverse the rotation of the new planner which has been pointed out consistently. The planner also behaves differently from blueprints where shift is used to remove obstacles, same way the planner used to work.

In my humble opinion, this was a backwards step. As I said previously, if Wube doesn't have any intentions of reversing this decision, I think there should be an extra modifier key that is held down to invoke the obstacle avoidance mode of the planner. Hell, you can have it default to an unassigned key so as to not confuse new players. Just seems silly to stray away from a feature (because that's what it was) that was working fine and did have numerous use cases through all stages of the game.

[FuryoftheStars]

Throwing in a +1 to bringing object avoidance back for the rail planner. Many have said the words better than I can.

[Unknow0059]

Could you guys Please make the icons of the Crafting Categories in the Inventory more minimalistic and readable?

I always have a hard time and fumble around before i click the category i'm looking for.

[Kyralessa]

When the change was made to rail planner modes, I tried not to care. The game is still in development; things will change; I'll get used to it. 99% of the changes made to the game, even when they take some getting used to, deepen and improve the gameplay.

But this rail planner mode change is the other 1%.

I'm still not used to it.

It's just not good.

One-way rotation

• I'm supposed to be able to hit R to rotate one way and Shift-R to rotate the other. But now, releasing Shift changes rail planner modes, so now I have to just Shift-R all the way around to avoid leaving rail-planning mode. What keeps happening is that I let up on Shift to rotate the way I want (which works everywhere else), and then I'm dumped out of rail planner mode. To add insult to injury, when I hit Shift to go back to rail planner mode, the rotation loses its state and goes back to any-direction state, and I have to start over.

Cliffs you can't knock down

• The rotation is a relatively minor, if constant, problem. The major problem with this change is that I can't route around trees, rocks, and especially cliffs anymore.
  
  For trees and rocks this isn't a huge problem because I can just chop/mine them. For cliffs this is a huge problem.
  
  Why? Because in every game, when I start building rails, I don't have oil. Without oil, I can't make explosives. Without explosives, I can't make cliff explosives. So the rail planner routes me through cliffs that I can't destroy.
  
  Without oil, I also don't have construction robots. So I can't have robots destroy the cliffs either.
  
  I'm left creating rails that route uselessly through cliffs, or painstakingly using manual rail placement until I finally get oil.

I'm all in favor of simplifying, making the game more accessible to new players, and so forth, but I humbly submit that this change was a major mistake and ought to be reverted.