Friday Facts #324 - Sound design, Animated trees, Optimizations

[BlueTemplar]

Watch out, getting RAM that is too fast for your motherboard might be a waste of money...

[BattleFluffy]

omg this is an amazing FFF :D

Ian - the footsteps are creepy and awesome! Please keep going ! :D

Allaizn - the method you've used to obtain tree movement is technically totally amazing :> Thanks for the indepth explanation, it is fascinating.
The overall result is really convincing as tree movements in the wind. I think it looks a little bit speckly and pixellated though... like its in need of some antialiasing or something.

Rseding - this is really awesome. Are targeters a new idea? This sort of optimizations is really amazing for ultra late game stuff.. I wonder how big I can build now? :>

[RawX]

I didn't understand how the targeters elimited the need for the checks maybe someone else can explain? Could be I am just to stupid.

As a comparison you might think of a family on a road trip. Formerly the child asked every second "Are we there yet?" and got a negative answer. Now the child sleeps until the parents inform it that they have arrived.

Or in a more ingame example: Train is getting unloaded and the inserter every tick goes "Is the train still here?" (destination), versus now it just continues until at some point the train tells it "I'm off" resulting in the inserter going into idle.

At least that's how I think that goes, although expressed kind of weirdly.

[wpirobotbuilder]

So... now that we've had these optimizations, what is now the slowest part of the Factorio tick?

[MrGrim]

Holy crap, what a FFF! It's like you guys read my mind and got to all of the things I could have hoped for all in one week!

If I could just ask one more tiny thing. With the sound redesign, could the "listener" be changed to the engineer instead of the camera? I spend so much of my time fully zoomed out, and I fear I'll miss out on all of this great sound work. It feels very odd while playing that sounds don't play in relation to my avatar.

Thank you!

[IronCartographer]

So... now that we've had these optimizations, what is now the slowest part of the Factorio tick?

The things that you build, meaning what a given save/map is doing, will determine this at any given time.

The scaling factor for each entity and network of interactions would probably be non-trivial to represent for communication and understanding.

[NelsonSKA]

How about add a tree movement when the biters pass through a forest? That will be awesome to watch!

[bbgun06]

Thank you for constantly making the game run better on my toaster computer! Every version I can build a larger factory!

How about add a tree movement when the biters pass through a forest? That will be awesome to watch!

This would be cool.

[MrBuisson]

Soooo, when do we get that update
I mean, 2.3 time faster (even if only part of the whole update) is not small !

On a side Note, there is one thing that I cannot fathom when factorio staff talk about multithreading: factorio already cut the whole map in chunks, why not making each chunk it’s own thread with its own data ? Even if that mean starting 40k+ threads, it’s not like there is a lot of interaction between chunks. And if a chunk is too small, make it a super 2x2 group of chunk : reduce border interactions.
I’m not saying put the “whatever module” into a thread, but make many mini but fully functional factorio blocks that interact one with another.
Just my external view on the thing, but i’d be interested to know if this has been ever considered by the guys doing the stuff (and what would be the reason why it’s not good).

And like always, keep on doing such a great job

[bobingabout]

I like the animated trees thing, goes nice with animated water. Though I have to wonder how long it'll be before I get sick of both of them, it's likely to give me motion sickness.

Also good news on the heat pipe optimisations, one of the largest things I see people asking with my nuclear power overhaul in my mod is "Can you do fake heat with fluid to make it less UPS hungry?".
Since fluids (in my mod) and electric are likely to far exceed heat usage in my mod, it's nice to see that in future, it'll effectively be free processing once you push the multi-threading update on this.


The only real bad thing I have to say is... Why does the main Factorio website force dark mode? that thing is pretty painful to read, Dark mode gives me optical distress.
so I posted a suggestion on the issue. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=78720

[netmand]

yay patch get!

next up is a big sticker to put on my automobile so people will be understand when I steer wildly into trees and rocks.

[miturion]

How about add a tree movement when the biters pass through a forest? That will be awesome to watch!

O god hahah. I get scary jurassic park memories.

Would be awesome though

[OvermindDL1]

The tree animation made my eyes water. Will there be a way to switch it off in game if I find it too distracting?

Yes, there is a toggle in the graphics settings. Though it pains my heart a little to see people jumping to turn it off - I hope you'll give it a chance at least

I quite want it on, but perhaps instead of a toggle you could add a slider for 'intensity' of the effect (a simple 0-N bias scale, where 0 is off (can just not run that shader then, fallback to the normal texture shader) and non-0 is a scale, can even turn it above 1.0 for a 'larger' effect (likely just adding a uniform to the shader depending on how it's all written)?

Targeters are a thing we created and have refined over the years for 2 main reasons:

1. They're disappear-aware pointers; when the thing you "target" is deleted, your pointer is cleared (set to nullptr).
2. They're saveable/loadable pointers; you can persist a pointer through save -> quit -> load.

So... they are Handle's? With based on later reading appears to also have a callback mapping somehow? ^.^

[bor]

Since you're working on the sound, I always found it annoying that the car gets quieter when you zoom out. Zooming out is pretty essential to not crashing when driving, Also the engine sound is quite nice. As is I either have to crash a lot and hear the engine or not crash but don't hear anything.

Maybe make things quieter the farther away from the character they are as opposed to the farther away from the camera they are? That way distance to the car would always be 0 since you're in it.

[morsk]

On a side Note, there is one thing that I cannot fathom when factorio staff talk about multithreading: factorio already cut the whole map in chunks, why not making each chunk it’s own thread with its own data ? Even if that mean starting 40k+ threads, it’s not like there is a lot of interaction between chunks. And if a chunk is too small, make it a super 2x2 group of chunk : reduce border interactions.

Large numbers of threads never work well; they have penalty for trying to avoid interfering with each other.

There's a new roguelike called Noita that does multithreading by splitting the world into chunks, but unfortunately I can't find the blog post on it anymore. It was something about treating the world as a checkerboard with 4 colors, and making sure chunks can only touch things half a chunk away from themselves at most. Chunks never interfere with each other in an update then. But that doesn't mean it would work well in Factorio, especially since the main limit seems to be memory not CPU.

[fishycat]

Awesome job again GFX guys

Now I'm excited to see what the sound guys come up with. I really would love to have some shore sounds on approach.

[Allaizn]

I quite want it on, but perhaps instead of a toggle you could add a slider for 'intensity' of the effect (a simple 0-N bias scale, where 0 is off (can just not run that shader then, fallback to the normal texture shader) and non-0 is a scale, can even turn it above 1.0 for a 'larger' effect (likely just adding a uniform to the shader depending on how it's all written)?

The values are not hardcoded, but instead defined by utility-constants.lua. I guess this means that an adjustment mod could be made (or you can just change them yourself in that file). The effect as it is right now is quite subtle - I'd be surprised if people end up having problems with it during normal gameplay.

[OvermindDL1]

I quite want it on, but perhaps instead of a toggle you could add a slider for 'intensity' of the effect (a simple 0-N bias scale, where 0 is off (can just not run that shader then, fallback to the normal texture shader) and non-0 is a scale, can even turn it above 1.0 for a 'larger' effect (likely just adding a uniform to the shader depending on how it's all written)?

The values are not hardcoded, but instead defined by utility-constants.lua. I guess this means that an adjustment mod could be made (or you can just change them yourself in that file). The effect as it is right now is quite subtle - I'd be surprised if people end up having problems with it during normal gameplay.

Honestly I'd imagine some people wanting to turn it up a bit. However, an adjustment mod that could dynamically change the value based on some weather conditions (for mods that have those) I've no doubt would be very welcome. ^.^

[mathturtle]

Thank you Rseding for the optimizations! I can't wait to play with them!

The moving trees/water look amazing too guys

Biter footsteps were something I never really thought about but I like what you have right now!

[Mooncat]

Now I can't wait to see what 1.0 will look and sound like.

Just a kind reminder: animating water and trees means you have to make sound effect for them too.