Friday Facts #335 - Scenario changes, Damage effect filtering

[invisus]

You could also limit the number of particles per amount of damage done.
Particles would double as damage indicator, then.

This sounds like a great way to indirectly convey damage! If this is doable, I’d love to see it in game.

[Eiermann]

is the changed wave-scenario already implemented or do we have to wait for the next patch?

[Klonan]

is the changed wave-scenario already implemented or do we have to wait for the next patch?

next patch, probably Tuesday (but anything can happen!)

[Unknow0059]

There is no item available to place color concrete, but players will be able to access them in the editor mode.

People would appreciate being able to use that in normal gameplay.

[Eiermann]

is the changed wave-scenario already implemented or do we have to wait for the next patch?

next patch, probably Tuesday (but anything can happen!)

thank you klonan. the next weekend will be a factory-weekend!

[Hiladdar]

Since you are looking at combat, the first think I would ask, is how smart or dumb are the biters, what are the biters natural inclination to combat. To what extent to they rely on principles of war, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_war. Since I am familiar the US Armed Forces definition as written up in FM 3-0, therefore, I'll focus my comments based on that.

From a gaming perspective, simplicity, unity, or objective of command is somewhat not practical to code, while mass is fairly easy, just add more bugs. It is OK, for biters to predominantly rely on mass, i.e. zombie hoard tactic, to attempt to overwhelm the defense, but does it make sense that some of the time there would be another use maneuver. Granted that this might require more extensive pathing algorithm, as well as more extensive coding on the back end to replicate some of the other attributes defined within the principles of war wiki web page to implement maneuver, or economy of force operations. Security and surprise might be fairly easy to program.

There is no reason why every now and then the bugs can spawn a Patton, Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, or a Suvorov every now and then, for example necessitating the player to change the way the defend the base.

This might not make sense to implement for 1.0, but might make interesting downloadable content post release 1.0.

Hiladdar

[ptx0]

yeah, it's much better in .18.x but still, firing 7 nukes into a vanilla mega nest is a good way to drop FPS to 0. any fewer nukes and we die instead.

That has nothing to do with biter path finding, artillery, or biter movement. You seem to just want to complain.

Maybe you can make your own game and show us how to do it properly?

i had another thought, a response to this winning attitude; you have given source access to other developers before. i could easily show you in your own codebase how it is done.

[seltha]

Since you are looking at combat, the first think I would ask, is how smart or dumb are the biters, what are the biters natural inclination to combat.

Time to add a Starship Troopers style "Brain Bug"?

[PumpkinVision]

Different colored concrete would be nice. Not only would it add to base aesthetics, but it could be used for high level planning of production areas.

[Philip017]

interesting DOT every 10 ticks instead of every, that should render a decent performance net.
however if particle effects are affecting performance delta at such a rate, perhaps cutting their generation by a margin that is configurable by the user could be optional, personally i could use half or one quarter of the normally generated effects and be perfectly content.

There is no reason why every now and then the bugs can spawn a Patton, Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, or a Suvorov every now and then, for example necessitating the player to change the way the defend the base.

biter / spitters grow in evolution, and i think that they even produce more medium and fewer small, as evolution grows, even mediums are all but not generated when behemoths arrive on scene, however special boss biters could be randomly generated with a wave a little earlier. but this would probably be a mod and not vanilla, if you are looking for a challenge try out natural evolution or rampant

[kirazy]

There is no item available to place color concrete, but players will be able to access them in the editor mode.

People would appreciate being able to use that in normal gameplay.

A mod to unlock them will be released in about 0.12 seconds after the update.

Maybe slightly longer, but realistically speaking mods that turn on hidden game entities don't take much effort.

[astroshak]

While you're optimising things, may I remind you that researching an arty range upgrade is still a great way to have your game grind to a halt? Even placing a new arty 2 roboport ranges forward from your existing arties is enough to take a lengthy coffee break.

That has already been severely optimized. The fact it works at all now instead of just locking up the game shows that. Unfortunately that's just a numbers thing; biters moving is slow and will always be slow. There's nothing that can be done about that. Shooting at a massive amount of them causing them all to run at 1 point just takes a lot of CPU time.

I doubt anyone will really like this idea, but ... increase the base range by 20-40 percent, and remove the range increase techs. If you want to have a bigger area cleared, place more artillery. No increased range tech, no sudden slow/near stop of the game for completing a tech. And this makes any such slow/near stop purely a result of the player’s direct action (not an action undertaken some time ago).

[DBotThePony]

So Rseding has gone ahead and killed 2/3 birds

Not the bird!

[bombcar]

That has already been severely optimized. The fact it works at all now instead of just locking up the game shows that. Unfortunately that's just a numbers thing; biters moving is slow and will always be slow. There's nothing that can be done about that. Shooting at a massive amount of them causing them all to run at 1 point just takes a lot of CPU time.

Maybe it would make sense to apply the increase over time, so the newly angered biters have a chance to die. But I'm not sure if this can be balanced in a way to actually work well enough. A dirty cheat could be to prevent arties from firing into sleeping biters while there are more than x biters moving on the map already. Or to simply disable auto-firing while there's an UPS slowdown and biter movement makes up a more than a certain percentage of the UPS.

Sorry, just throwing around random ideas...

We already do logic like that for construction robots and get complaints about them all the time when people build crazy amounts of things at once. There's no solution so we just leave it as is.

Of turrets could be connected to the circuit network ...

You can do a workaround with a timer and an inserter.

[Dune]

Wave defense

Are the biters going to evolve? But the only means of getting points is killing their bases? I'm not in favor of this change.

How do you get points while working on your base? You seem to think players will always be playing this multi-player, such that there are extra hands to do tasks, but the rocket won't launch on its own.

Oh well, you guys love changing the rules of the game instead of just polishing. It's the factorio way, fixing something when it's not broken. No doubt there are other issues yet to come to light as a result of this fundamental change to the way wave defense points are earned.

[ownlyme]

biters dont give money anymore? xD
thanks for ruining your scenario so my mod looks even more compelling
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Wave_Defense_Unlimited

[aljo]

you seem to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed today.

I don't think Rseding was the person who woke up pissed.

Sorry, but I agree with the other guy. Generally the Factorio staff come across as super nice dudes, but my immediate reaction to Rseding's comment was a vocal "hahaha jeez dude, ok then". It was noticeably out of character for the Factorio devs. Yeah, the OP he was responding to might have been a little negative, but honestly not nearly enough to get that kind of response. The OP certainly wasn't being rude.

[Koub]

[Koub] I'd like not to have to use aggressive moderation, so please refocus on the FFF, and don't add fuel to the fire.

[coppercoil]

Colored concrete would be great, though I'd say it's oversaturated. Everytime people want to color something, they give near 100% saturation. Damn it... Pure colors look synthetic.
Also lightness of concrete is very different, I'm not sure whether it is good or not. This is kinda not consistent.

By the way, how do you choose colors? You should know RGB colorspace is evil. Do you know HSL is evil too? That's because they has nothing to how colors are perceived by human eye. You may be interested in HCL colorspace (cylindrical CIELab), though it's also not the very best. Check a colorpicker I have found.

[coderpatsy]

Colored concrete would be great, though I'd say it's oversaturated. Everytime people want to color something, they give near 100% saturation. Damn it... Pure colors look synthetic.
Also lightness of concrete is very different, I'm not sure whether it is good or not. This is kinda not consistent.

It appears its purpose was not to look good for general use but to stand out in the launch area of one specific scenario. I think they succeeded in that goal.