Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain

[Deadlock989]

I've noticed a couple of these glitches and they make this otherwise extremely polished game feel unfinished. I think this needs some sort of fix before 1.0. I guess this could get complicated though.

So there are two possibilities.

1. It's extremely difficult to fix because Factorio is a sprite-based 2.5D game and always will be, and it is at any rate almost inconsequential.
2. It's easy to fix and the devs have decided to completely ignore it for no reason at all for several years in a row, despite it making the game "literally unplayable".

Which do you think is more likely?

[Deadlock989]

I really like the landfill. I think it looks good and it's a simple but effective solution to the problem of which terrain type should be used to fill in. I don't have a strong association, outside of this game, between the terms "landfill" and "beauty contest".

I'll be smothering it in concrete, though, natch.

[Johansho]

I like the new idea and look of new landfill terrain. However, shores look still as it has natural origin, so it looks like there were heavy duty dirt works on land that was already there. What if the shores looked also more artificial? Something more straight and sloped like here: http://www.coastalwiki.org/w/images/thu ... wering.jpg

Anyways I like your attention to details, very neat!

[mrvn]

Now that you're doing things with lanfill... how about making a way to remove ladfill?
I hate having to be scared of placing one bit of landfill wrong when I build my nuclear reactors, having to load a save if I mess up and then having to place all of it again. What about having some sort of miner structure which removes all landfill (but not normal terrain) in a radius of a couple tiles, or an explosive which does the same thing?
It would also be nice to have an option to automatically place landfill under every entity in a blueprint, so you can just place any blueprint on water.

The waterfill mod has waterfill made from water. SeaBlock mod has explosives that create water just like you describe. No check for it being only on landfill though. But with the new landfill terrain that check would be easy to add. And LandfillEverything allows placing a blueprint with landfill added under every entity that needs it.

Using those mods can influenece the devs to add it to vanilla.

Note: I think there should be a recipe probably involving wood that produces landfill that looks like a raft. Something that makes it visibly clear there is still water beneath it. Then removing the raft to get water back makes a lot more sense.

[Impatient]

I dared to write a sarcastic comedy about the fluid mixing saga:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=75707

[bman212121]

Personally I think that NiceFill should be in the base game. Having a different texture for landfill looks, honestly, kinda dumb. Personal opinion please dont murder me xD

This is why I do like these discussions about different topics. I vaguely recall hearing someone talk about nicefill before, but forgot about it. I just downloaded it to try it out because we also don't really care for how adding land adds mud. We have flying robots but apparently aren't advanced enough to lay sod down on top of soil.

[mrvn]

Personally I think that NiceFill should be in the base game. Having a different texture for landfill looks, honestly, kinda dumb. Personal opinion please dont murder me xD

This is why I do like these discussions about different topics. I vaguely recall hearing someone talk about nicefill before, but forgot about it. I just downloaded it to try it out because we also don't really care for how adding land adds mud. We have flying robots but apparently aren't advanced enough to lay sod down on top of soil.

If you want to go really far have landfill lay down mud. But then have the surrounding terrain grow into the mud. So if you place landfill in the desert then sand creeps in over time.

[bman212121]

For the pipes I think several people have offered better suggestions than just preventing mixing. The entire problem with pipes is that they are this special thing that users can't interact with, and they have all of these partial item and weird properties going on. If we could start over on pipes I think it would have been beneficial to treat them like fluid belts. My suggestion for probably another game would be something like this:

1. Put a static speed on the flow rate, that is well known. Belts all have static "flow" rates and it allows everyone to easily understand how much is moving down the belt.

2. Numbers should go back down to something manageable. Everyone knows you can fit 8 items on one belt square, a pipe should be able to hold say 8 or 10 items per pipe tile.

3. Allow fluids to just mix in the pipe. hover over it and you can see a section contains 5 water, 3 crude oil, 2 lubricant

4. Fluids can only move if there is room in an adjacent pipe. If there is no room then a fluid can't move.

6. Pipes can flow in any direction, but you can have T junction splitters were you can filter one of the input / outputs to only allow certain things to flow. (Since it can flow in either direction, you could say block a junction so that one side only allows crude oil to flow. This means it can pass either way through this, and would allow you to use that as a mechanism to prevent unwanted things from flowing. It would prevent certain fluids from both going into, and going out of a section of pipe.)

7. Items ability to move is going to be governed by consumption, not by production. Put water and crude oil into the same pipe, and have a factory only consuming water. If you have 9 water and 1 crude in that pipe, then 9 units of water will be able to flow provided you aren't pushing additional crude into the pipe. Then once you get more crude, the flow will start to fall off. If there is 5 crude units sitting in the pipe in front of a factory consuming water, then only 5 water units can make it into that factory at a time. Once you fill that pipe with other fluids then it will starve the factory and it will stop producing since no water can flow.

8. If nothing is in a pipe, then a consumption item (Factory, pump) is treated as a vacuum and can move up to 1 pipes worth of void per movement. If there are 10 items of "air" in the pipe, a factory will keep consuming 10 items per movement rate until it pulls a fluid to it. Once it pulls the desired fluid to itself it can start consuming it, or if it pulls another fluid then it starts cutting down how much of a vacuum it can create. (If we wanted tiers we could potentially cap low level things to say only consume 4 items / s, where larger ones can consume say 6, and the largest can move 10)

9. Allow the player to handle fluids, and store them in their inventory. They should be able to hand barrel fluids, so they can fix any pipe at any time.

Using the t junction would allow you to fix busted lines. simply drop a t junction down on a line, put a filter on it for a certain item. Then you need a pump so it can "consume" items, and finally put them into storage. (Basically the equivalent of inserters putting items into storage chests) We could also have "filtered pumps" so if you wanted to you could toss one of those down right next to a pipe, and have it pull certain items directly off of the pipe. It would be a similar mechanic to the t junction, but pumps are one way where a t junction is two way.

Advantages:

No need to worry about fluid mixing
Provide ways to actually fix when a fluid mixes with another fluid
Allow pipe reuse so low consuming entities can share a pipe
Provide a new mechanic that is similar to an existing one, but still works in a unique way
Provides a way to actually calculate item movement
Retains two way flow, which makes it unique to belts

disadvantages:

More complex to manage
Can cause input problems until players learn how to deal with them
May be CPU intensive since you can't just rely on items only traveling in one direction at a set speed like belts do

I'm sure there are a number of holes you can poke into my idea, but I think overall it would fit into a Factorio like game. It provides something for people to optimize and obsess over, but it doesn't have all of the unknowns the current pipe system has. Everything should be something that can be calculated out, and would provide unique challenges while retaining some consistency with current game items.

[bman212121]

Personally I think that NiceFill should be in the base game. Having a different texture for landfill looks, honestly, kinda dumb. Personal opinion please dont murder me xD

This is why I do like these discussions about different topics. I vaguely recall hearing someone talk about nicefill before, but forgot about it. I just downloaded it to try it out because we also don't really care for how adding land adds mud. We have flying robots but apparently aren't advanced enough to lay sod down on top of soil.

If you want to go really far have landfill lay down mud. But then have the surrounding terrain grow into the mud. So if you place landfill in the desert then sand creeps in over time.

The only issue with that is the game would need to have dynamic terrain. That would be cool, but I think that opens the can of worms up to things like soil erosion, rain fall, tree regrowth etc. The easiest solution is really just have tiles for mud, sod, sand, and let the player place whatever they want over the current ground. Then it's basically just a cosmetic item like concrete. The only reason for caring is to make it look pretty, so separate the looks from the functional part.

[mrvn]

Personally I think that NiceFill should be in the base game. Having a different texture for landfill looks, honestly, kinda dumb. Personal opinion please dont murder me xD

This is why I do like these discussions about different topics. I vaguely recall hearing someone talk about nicefill before, but forgot about it. I just downloaded it to try it out because we also don't really care for how adding land adds mud. We have flying robots but apparently aren't advanced enough to lay sod down on top of soil.

If you want to go really far have landfill lay down mud. But then have the surrounding terrain grow into the mud. So if you place landfill in the desert then sand creeps in over time.

The only issue with that is the game would need to have dynamic terrain. That would be cool, but I think that opens the can of worms up to things like soil erosion, rain fall, tree regrowth etc. The easiest solution is really just have tiles for mud, sod, sand, and let the player place whatever they want over the current ground. Then it's basically just a cosmetic item like concrete. The only reason for caring is to make it look pretty, so separate the looks from the functional part.

Too late. Already exists.

There are mods for having forests grow if there isn't too much pollution. Or have the terrain change if you walk the same path frequently.

And https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LandfillPainting make it a cosmetic item. Different landfills for grass and sand and rotation to switch between the different sub-types. Anyone that wants some variety in their landfill should try that.

[bman212121]

Personally I think that NiceFill should be in the base game. Having a different texture for landfill looks, honestly, kinda dumb. Personal opinion please dont murder me xD

This is why I do like these discussions about different topics. I vaguely recall hearing someone talk about nicefill before, but forgot about it. I just downloaded it to try it out because we also don't really care for how adding land adds mud. We have flying robots but apparently aren't advanced enough to lay sod down on top of soil.

If you want to go really far have landfill lay down mud. But then have the surrounding terrain grow into the mud. So if you place landfill in the desert then sand creeps in over time.

The only issue with that is the game would need to have dynamic terrain. That would be cool, but I think that opens the can of worms up to things like soil erosion, rain fall, tree regrowth etc. The easiest solution is really just have tiles for mud, sod, sand, and let the player place whatever they want over the current ground. Then it's basically just a cosmetic item like concrete. The only reason for caring is to make it look pretty, so separate the looks from the functional part.

Too late. Already exists.

There are mods for having forests grow if there isn't too much pollution. Or have the terrain change if you walk the same path frequently.

And https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LandfillPainting make it a cosmetic item. Different landfills for grass and sand and rotation to switch between the different sub-types. Anyone that wants some variety in their landfill should try that.

That sounds pretty cool. I think they are probably best kept in mods since it's not really a core focus of the game, but being able to use them still adds to the aesthetics of the game.

[CharaTheEngineer]

I really like the idea behind the new landfill, but i hate the way it is executed.
I believe it would be better to make the squares bigger and in a more imperfect grid.
And maybe make it a little bit less visible.

[qweqwertz]

eww my factory is going to be dirty with that landfill texture

[foamy]

Now that you're doing things with lanfill... how about making a way to remove ladfill?
I hate having to be scared of placing one bit of landfill wrong when I build my nuclear reactors, having to load a save if I mess up and then having to place all of it again. What about having some sort of miner structure which removes all landfill (but not normal terrain) in a radius of a couple tiles, or an explosive which does the same thing?
It would also be nice to have an option to automatically place landfill under every entity in a blueprint, so you can just place any blueprint on water.

Yes *please* to both of these. Shift-click to auto-place landfill under any entity in a blueprint that requires it, allowing for a blueprint to put both landfill and other entities down on the same tile at once (incl. ideally concrete), and being able to undo landfilling are all very desirable QoL things.

[Chaoseed]

That landfill graphic is GREAT! I'm suddenly realizing how weird it was that my factory-making-player could just conjure up beautiful grassy meadows.

[Hiladdar]

The land fill is OK by me. My recommendation is to have an option in the set up to let the player choose if the land fill will be just plain dirt or seeded grass. In this case the default should be grass.

Regarding the pipes. I never had an issue with the 0.16 if fluids got mixed up due to my bad design or placement. The fix was easy. When something does not work as expected through no fault of the player, that is an issue, like the issues presented in this FF. Although I would like to see a new stable release on the home page, my recommendation is to fix fluid processing. This is something that is currently broken that needs to be fixed.

Hiladdar

[Rebmes]

It really sounds like it might have been better to make the fluids systems more like the electrical systems, and not have actual fluid flowing through there, rather teleporting at certain rates from and to connections along a same-liquid line. You could even trigger fake flowing animations along the "path" of the liquid. It's hard to imagine this fluid thing having been worth it :/ but I guess when you don't know where the rabbit hole ends....

[xARCHONx]

I always figured that having either a pipe with a closed end could add a nice touch, like the pipe already does, but this one does not connect automatically and can be rotated.

Alternatively, if fluid mixing is detected in an adjacent pipe, let the pipe only connect to one of the fluid boxes, so you can build regular pipes next to each other. I realise the problem would be telling the game with fluid box to connect to, but why not implement a sort of drag to place strategy that would tell the game dragging from an oil pipe to a blank space connects it, but does not connect to the Water pipe next to it.

Blueprints will likely need some way to record this action as well.

The landfill looks good, I like how it seems natural, yet man-made

[Sutremaine]

Some random ideas:

Detect fluid mixing as currently, but allow players to force-place an entity using the Shift key.

Reverting to the old 'you messed up, now you have to purge the pipes' behaviour and adding a tutorial that teaches players how to purge the pipes.

Reverting to the old behaviour and making the mixing more obvious. The game can detect what fluid should be in a pipe, and if it finds anything different then it can notify the player.

[eradicator]

I even remember a dev somewhere, once upon a time, said they were considering to add pipes that don't auto-connect to a) solve the mixing and b) give the player more control in general. Now i wonder why that never happend...