Friday Facts #350 - Electric mining drill redesign

[Ericwu91]

I loved the new design! It conveys the idea of a planet-destroyer more clearly, and I hate it love it!

Still, I think the sound has margin for improvement... As it is (at least from the sample provided), it's too noisy. I know, it is supposed to sound busy, but I can't hear the bits hitting the ground through all that blank sound. Maybe tune the noisy overhead a little bit?

[DanGio]

Great job !

[Enricthered]

very sexy drill redesign I love it

[perahoky]

Please add much more dirt dust and smoke to the animation. Thats a earth breaking mining operation, not a small pickaxe.

[NastyFlytrap]

Dunno guys, not a fan of the drill itself. The support structure that holds it up looks nice but the drill itself is kinda ehh....

[AlexGreen]

I think the developers should be consistent with "this" "Bottleneck" "extension for the driller, and insert this for all producing buildings ....

That actually could be very useful... and more consistent.

[luc]

I kinda feel like the timing between drill movements (or "dwell time") should both be longer and independent of the effective drill speed. Seeing it move like every half-second with twelve beacons looks... Wasteful? The amount of "working" movement doesn't fit the amount of output, IMHO.

This was also my first thought. Maybe not stay in one spot until it's empty, but it could easily be twice as long and probably seem much better.

[BattleFluffy]

I love this drill :>

[NekoBaron]

I genuinely dislike the new look of the drills and the sound is super aggressive :/

I feel the sweeper arm surface scraping is more logical also as opposed to 1 dimension of travel of a drill head, someone did mention this also.
I guess I also need to see like 80 of them working at once in a small area to get a real feel of it since that's how I generally see/hear them ingame.

[ssilk]

recent design trend seems to be a bit too cartoonish (just an honest opinion)

I see also this tendency. I don’t know if I like it or not. Personally I like the poor, temporary style.

And that bittersweet melancholy in the whole setting goes lost. A bit. Don’t want to change it, just my opinion.

The sound is cool. I heard it a while: that really isn’t a place you would like to stay.

[5thHorseman]

Not that I'm suggesting a redesign, but it'd be cool if instead of lifting, moving, and drilling down, the animation was instead to move the overhead mount to 1 of 9 points in the 3x3 grid (shifted for artistic license) while leaving the point where the drill intersects the ground in the center. Then the drill would be angled in one of 9 ways, leaving us to imagine that the drill is deep and complicated enough to mine out the 5x5 area. Also it would simplify the animation, with perhaps only a few frames of movement (if any?) needed between the 9 states.

You could also make sure the drill mount only moved in the 4 cardinal directions, lessening the need for animation frames.

This would address most if not all of the concerns about how the drill looks vs how it works in game terms.

[Noorphish]

Hello,

I think, the icons in the crafting menu need a redesing too. Use more color!
It looks like the same. Check the image.

factorio-mining-drill.jpg (83.69 KiB) Viewed 7924 times

[J-H]

Feedback, maybe a bit late. The new sprite for solar panels on a conveyor belt looks WAY WAY too much like speed packs. I actually put a splitter to divert "the extra belt of speedpacks" into my rocket control factory and had it run for a while before I realized the shape was off.

The color (bright blue) doesn't match what they traditionally have looked like and it's confusing. Doesn't help that they're the same shape.

[Mr. Tact]

They look nice, although being a curmudgeon I like the old ones too. My only question would do the new ones cause a higher load on ups/fps? Might be the same, might not...

[Milenier]

i think this isn't the way to go.
i liked the old design for being simple yet something that is inovative. it just looks much better then the fueled version beacuse it wasn't just drill straped to an engine. but the new design? not so much.

i think the miner shouldn't be drill but something that doesn't need much effort of moving back and forth to mine new patch of ore. that's why i think we shouldn't completely scrap the old design but revamp it into something that is more fitting the heavy industrialization. i think it would be much better if we used technology that is more fitting.

so i looked up online what is now normaly used mining machines and i have found continous miners

miner.jpg

. what if we used the old design but instead of those triangle things we used one cylinder in the place of the triangles. and uranium mining wouldn't look any bad with that design as sulfuric acid could be sprayed infront of the rotating cylinder.

also what i think would be absolute banger is screw conveyor miner design. it will move back and forth like the old electric miner design (or the cylinder) but the mining element would serve as killing two birds with one stone => mining the resource and moving the resource onto a belt.
technically speaking it will be the same as screw propelled machines work but instead of moving the miner it will mine the ore.

sadly i'm no artist and i have horrible english aswell as my drawing. i just do not think the drill is the right way. i hope you'll understand what i have tried to say in this reply.

i know you have put a lot of work in the new design but i think atleast few people will agree on this.

tl:dr lets not use drills. lets use quickly rotating cylinders or screws

[AlveKatt]

I have a gripe with the new design. On my first playthroughs I didn't figure out the range of the mining machines was the blue field around it. With this design, it is even less apparent. It looks so much more focused on the centre. I wouldn't prioritize visual familiarity over visual clarity. I would have had two drill bits at least, near to the sides. I would have chosen one of the flatter rounded drill head designs, and have some particle sparks going off when they go down. (Edit: or maybe go for Mileniers suggestion about cylinders.)

Then I would have them leave ugly holes behind after having mined for a while, not filled with water, maybe mud instead, but still not walkable, that you would have to landfill to build anything else than another drill there. (And you could make it so that you would be lowering the amount of mineable ore left on a patch if you landfill it before it is completely mined out.)

If you want to expand on this mechanic; make the hole a few different depths depending on how long the patch has been mined. Say it has three levels of depth maximum. A tile mined to three layers down takes three landfills to fill. And of course, a mining machine can't drill selectively, so even if some tiles had less or no ore you still get a three level hole. I realize there might be some head-scratching about what would happen if you move drills around so you get holes of different levels under one machine, I'll leave that up to you if you like this idea enough to implement it.

As it is now, I don't quite feel a real purpose for landfill in a standard map. It might have something to do with that I never play without the pretty rail bridge mod. But still, this would give landfill a very tangible purpose.

[AlveKatt]

They look nice, although being a curmudgeon I like the old ones too. My only question would do the new ones cause a higher load on ups/fps? Might be the same, might not...

From the post:

Since the movement of the drill is procedural and Ernestas was smart about optimizing the spritesheet space, we can save a lot of VRAM compared to the original mining drill (about 40MB). We were considering a lot more additional animations but it would multiply VRAM requirements too much, or it would become too procedural and too complicated to implement.

I interpret this to mean that it would even have less impact on FPS than the old ones.

[DanGio]

The old miner doesn't look like it can reach a 5*5 area either. The new miner doesn't even try to look like it can and he's right to do so : 5*5 mining area is a vital gameplay mechanic and noone wants it to disappear, although it's not very logic : 2 miners mining the same tiles ? they should break apart each other. I'm totally OK to take both the gameplay and the graphics, as 2 different things, both good in their field.

[qq271206247]

amazing design！every time when I check the forums, you guys always give me some surprise! love you guys!

[Illiou]

I'm not a huge fan of the new mining drills. I really liked the old ones, thought they were quite clever and I also liked how steady and predictable they were, always outputting while at the ends for example.

The new design is kinda erratic - disturbing the rhythm and peace of the factory.

Although if they stay, some more specific feedback:
I feel like the supports where the arms are attached could be lower. That way they would obscure less of what's going on.
As others have already said make them less erratic and in my opinion also more regular and predictable.
The bases of them needs some more shading - right now they look like they're floating in the air.

Lastly, the sound reminds me of when some games would have an error and freeze but the sound would still keep playing, somehow overlaying all possible sounds with each other, looping the last few seconds over and over again. Sorry Ian, but that's what this sounds like to me. I would appreciate something less noisy.