Friday Facts #281 - For a Few Frames More

[Dixi]

now if only i didn't have to hold my hands together in frustration while the game pauses and takes 30 seconds to save my huge base. totally interrupting my train of thought, or biter attack. i brought this up before but no one seemed to think it was a great idea, but i would really love a 10 seconds to save notification somehow.

We've asked for faster auto saves before, but got refused.
Answer was - because Windows does not support something. I suppose because dev's don't want, for some reason, to make separate thread, to save to file copied or serialized data.

I still think that fast auto save is an important part of gameplay, and I hope to see it implemented before release.

[quyxkh]

We've asked for faster auto saves before, but got refused.

Yeah, but then they implemented it. It's still experimental enough that you have to edit the config file, but set

Code: Select all

non-blocking-saving=true

in config.ini and I'd expect you'll be very, very happy.

The first implementation was I think linux-only and literally instantaneous, you couldn't tell it had happened at all except for the little placard off on the side, but apparently that didn't work out, they've since switched to a version that causes something like a microstutter, it's noticeable but it's not annoying, I don't recall it ever eating keystrokes like the blocking autosaves do¹, and I think it works on Windows too. As I recall rseding91 said the parallel autosave can still interfere with performance, and on really big maps it'll even be worse for overall UPS than usual since your rig's already pushed to its liimits. I guess that's no surprise, even if writing a save file takes no processing it still has to funnel all that data across the bus at least twice, and probably through L2/L3 too, some contention is unavoidable and the game's already bandwidth constrained.

¹ When I'm playing steadily, about once a week I'll see Factorio wedge in autosave, but it's so rare and so impossible to reproduce I haven't reported it, I figure if it's really causing problems on headless servers that'll get reported pdq, I suspect sleep/wakeup is interfering and it tends to happen when I just forget, when I afk unintentionally.

[SpiffyTriffid]

This can be improved further by drawing sprites not as rectangles but as generic polygons that envelope sprites such that most of the fully transparent areas won't be rasterized.

I think you mean envelop.

[Mithaldu]

Am I weird for liking the 'noisy' look of low quality compression?

Nah, it actually does look better. The original animation is smooth and clean but mainly so because the player model does not have a lot of small detail and its animation is actually rendered very stiffly. (try moving your head like that without moving your hips AT ALL. it doesn't work) However due to the zoom level and what the character is, the human brain WOULD expect to see a lot of small detail things moving.

The compression adds random noise that isn't designed detail, but tricks the brain into thinking there is the movement it expects to see, so it actually looks nicer than the uncompressed animation.

In other words: It masks some of the uncanny valley effect.

It would probably look a little worse on things though that are stiff and mechanic, like pipes with fluid moving in them.

Might be nice if there was an option to apply the low quality compression only to "organic" things.

[Zavian]

Might be nice if there was an option to apply the low quality compression only to "organic" things.

I think it could also work when viewing things in zoomed in map mode. (eg your visual pickups make the view more noisy, which I consider to be expected/consistent with Factorio's mechanics and aesthetics).

[emp_zealoth]

God, started reading FFF again and this is exactly why you guys are so awesome. Just doing everything to make sure the game runs better and better