Friday Facts #325 - New Explosions and Particles

[Unknow0059]

The particle FX on the Roboport ain't looking so hot. It doesn't make sense for the "shot spark" to pop up randomly within an area.
A random shot spark should happen relative to the position of the last shot, within a circle.
Either do that, or make the whole area circular and smaller.

The biter, wall and rail FX look awesome though.

[Krazykrl]

The particle FX on the Roboport ain't looking so hot. It doesn't make sense for the "shot spark" to pop up randomly within an area.
A random shot spark should happen relative to the position of the last shot, within a circle.
Either do that, or make the whole area circular and smaller.

The biter, wall and rail FX look awesome though.

Yea, I agree that it looks wonky; the engineer must be yelling really loud to have a 16 square meter spread from 8 meters away. Having the bullets precess randomly within a bounding polygon would look way betterer, and even morer bettererer would be a scaling boolet-to-boolet-inaccuracy delta that scales with "Weapon-Current-Range / Weapon-max-range".

[Jelmergu]

Hitting 50k reviews isn't the most impressive thing about those reviews. The fact that the reviews are Overwelmingly Positive is a bigger archievement and the thing to be the most proud about. Well done Wube

[5thHorseman]

This particle box on the roboport makes it look like the character has Parkinson's disease.

Yeah, my first thought was "he can't aim"

...unless he's expertly hitting all the most vulnerable spots to destroy the roboport as efficiently as possible.

Or they did it to show the effect at its most pronounced.

[FasterJump]

All of this looks very good to me. It helps with the feeling interacting with the terrain and entities.

Although some previous comments makes a point, just remember that destruction doesn't happens often in an average game. All those new graphics, even if not perfect yet, looks good enough to me. In fact it's already more than what I'm expecting for the game.

Great job on polishing everything, can't wait to see water and vegetation movement in the game (specially with the fixed color, it was like playing with sunglasses on).

[Oktokolo]

Maybe it is time to think about whether all weapons should be able to destroy all entities. Rails "exploding" due to gun fire or biter bites are hillarious to the point where it becomes immersion breaking.
Having different hit and death animations for different damage types would also make sense.

Welcome to the uncanny valley of particle FX.

[bleistift2]

There is one thing that has always bothered me with the worms’ dying animation: Quite often it was not clear if a worm was dead or not. When a worm dies it tumbles for a moment before falling. This always looked like an “I’m angry at you” move. More than once I’ve had spit in my face because I had confused the two animations. With the new blood effect I believe this won’t happen anymore.

Another annoying quirk was that worms couldn’t die during their attack animation. If you happened to kill a worm while it was spitting at you, it would continue its animation through to the end and only then start its “Oh no! I’m dead” animation. I’m eager to see if this is still the case. It was really disturbing to shoot at a dead enemy only to be killed by its kin.

[Brambor]

You make me feel someone is gonna have a child.

[bobucles]

The absolute HAIL of brass spraying out of the rifle is pure gold. Unf.

[BlueTemplar]

Michael Bay can't wait to play with the new special effects !
Factorio - Directed by Michael Bay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6mc0QYjU0I

In regards to other milestones... we might have something else to announce in the weeks to come .

You are going to break the 2M copies sold, aren't you ?

[Philip017]

congratulations on all the positive reviews, mine is in there somewhere... that is props to just how great of a game that you are making!

im not sure about the new effects, but i will reserve my opinions to after the game is released with the changes and i have sampled them

[Keplergamer]

Awesome explosions effects, specially on the Rails.

Check-out the classic Total Annihilation, and how this kind of effect made the game feel years ahead of it's time. Each entity blows pieces in it's own way, and not all the time. But when it does it's very satisfying to watch.


Edit:

For instance:
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=835
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1027
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1109
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1135
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1188 - look at the turrets head blowing far away.
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1219 - Another great effect
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1414 - Static miners being blown apart
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1428 - the satisfaction when you finally kill that walking robot and several others right afterwards.
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1658 - This big turret has the best effect of what I was trying to say
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1679 - and that fragile anti-air rocket launcher turret also blows in a very satisfactory way, specially on this game, where they normally put 100 of those to attack tanks and robots (little damage, but in so many numbers and very big range...) Then you send and army that blows a lot of those turrets in seconds like a cavalry runs over the opposing army. It's really satisfying.
https://youtu.be/z6iRPCyQBfc?t=1947 - just another scene with a LOT going on, and how this little effect adds up to the experience.


Anyway, thx for this awesome game, and awesome Friday Facts diary. One of my favorite reads of the week for years now.

[chris13524]

so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release

0.18 release on Christmas day confirmed.

[Krazykrl]

Michael Bay can't wait to play with the new special effects !
Factorio - Directed by Michael Bay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6mc0QYjU0I

In regards to other milestones... we might have something else to announce in the weeks to come .

You are going to break the 2M copies sold, aren't you ?

Yep, it's going to look pretty nifty; especially with the mayhem in multiplayer. I'm actually getting pretty excited to see how snazzy all the small things that haven't been top priority will start looking as Factorio gets closer to release; features where you go "I didn't know I needed this."

[kbk]

I'd like to say a word regarding randomized 'hit' particle on entity damage. Particles should really have a tendency to show up closer to entity sides that are closest to the source of incoming damage. I hope this won't be that much of an overcomplication in big O terms in exchange for tidier, more deterministic looks.

19.12.14.01.factorio.PNG (826.67 KiB) Viewed 7030 times

[DanGio]

Roboport impact offset seem to get a lot of attention. I think it could get fine tuned, but right now I feel like the random position give a wonderful 90's touch. It doesn't render an accurate trajectory of bullets, but it renders the idea of entity being damaged really nicely.

[Solinya]

Do the new explosion effects and particles apply to modded assets? For example, if someone creates a new entity with graphics in a mod, are they able to pre-pick existing smoke/wood/metal particles or will they have to create all new particle animations? What's the default going to be? (I suppose custom remnants are required to make it look good.)

I'm also assuming whatever you settle on for the roboport bullet strikes will also scale up or down with entity size, e.g. custom 6x6 entities or the rocket silo.

[bw_mutley]

To devs, congratulations for such a polished work - not only the graphics tweeks as of recently, but all of it, including the game mechanics. And congratulations for the Steam milestone, ofc!

[mtfreitasf]

To the dev team,

Congratulations on the awesome game!!!

[luc]

- shooting particles (like on roboport) should be more on the side the entity is shooted

Seconded, this looks really weird to have bullets sparking off the back of an entity.

Since you don't have 3d models but 2d sprites (if I'm not mistaken), it's not possible to know which areas/pixels are reachable by the player's gun. An easier solution that approximates it might be a biased random, where for example 80% of the sparks occur in the nearest 50% of the sprite (so in the roboport demo, the left half of it). Something like spark.position.x=random(0, random(0, target_width)) (of course this needs to be more elaborate to include the direction one is shooting from). That code gives a distribution of [274, 207, 130, 106, 88, 54, 52, 36, 32, 14, 7] for the x-axis of a 10 pixel wide entity over 1000 bullet sparks.