Friday Facts #393 - Putting things on top of other things

[Pham_Nuwen]

I like the new faster belts and the attention to make sure it's visible when item are moving. I had seen a random resize, or offset in the item sprites from this mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/rp_item_anarchy , adding color on top those things will help me

I like this mods solution to making the movement of belts more visible much more than the slight colour variation.

[DanGio]

Obviously I haven't seen the green belts in game yet but here is a few ideas that probably don't have potential:
Enclosed Belts:
Blurry Items:

In any case, these ideas aren't common, plus there's a graphic render attached... Great 1st post

[NumberNick]

So it seems like the visuals on the new belt is the biggest issue because at 60 fps it's hard to tell if it's going forward, backwards, or sitting still with a flashing. The random colors of items on belts does help but I think it can be better.

The problem I find with the noise is it's very "busy". Lots of little features moving around on the screen.

It would be interesting to see if you could rely on something other than noise to set the color. Perhaps based on the game tick going into some sinusoidal function. This might give larger groups of items a more distinct color and large features are much easier to track with the eye. Could also rely on position + game tick together. Random noise could still be done on top of this as well.

The biggest issue I can see is if alot of different inserters are all feeding into the same belt then it may just be reduced back to looking entirely random again. At least it's not any worse than the original problem in that scenario.

Aside from that the actual allowed colors could be changed to be more distinct as well. Choosing from a continuous range is nice but it's too blurry/random. We could just have 3 possible colors of items: ex. light, regular, and dark. In this way we are also reducing the complexity of the visual noise.

[bobucles]

Ore has random icons and it looks cool. Why can't other items have random icons too?
Most obvious one imo is the gear wheel. Rotate it a bit and it's a new icon. Plates might have various cookie cutter shapes (festive shapes?), circuits can have different wiring, science could have different beakers. Hmm, it probably gets trickier with icons that already have lots of detail. There's also the situation where different icons might be used to represent the quality tiers, but the interaction of informational icons with stacks could get ugly. Actually, the interaction of quality tiers with belt stacks sounds pretty messy, it may warrant its own article.

I guess it's a complicated topic.

[Qon]

science could have different beakers.

They already are getting different beakers. But each science pack has it's own shape. That's better than random, helps color blind people.

[zebiko]

I have been enjoying Friday facts for a while now, loving seeing the progress and new mechanics coming in the expansion. I haven't used any stacker mods in my playthroughs, but this Friday fact got me more excited for the expansion. The stacking stack inserters is a very good way to implement a way to upgrade belt throughput.

I do have one thing to point out though. I use bob's adjustable inserters in all my modded runs, because it's a huge quality of life that makes sense for mechanical arm machines. Not being able to adjust where inserters pick up and drop off items seems weird, especially when you have the technology to make rockets and go to space. Obviously, this mod makes red inserters pointless. I would like to have all the inserters to be adjustable innately, with increasing adjustability with higher rank tiers, instead of the current research-based unlock with the mod, and then red inserters can be removed or changed.

[thykka]

[redacted]

[morhp]

I agree with the following suggestions:

• Probably remove the faster belt tier again. It doesn't look good. The different item shading effect is nice and can be kept, but the visuals of the super fast belt look bad. It would probably be okay on my 120Hz gaming monitor, but not everyone has these. The 4x capacity increase of the belt stacks is probably enough (of course I don't know other plans) and super fast belt transport might make trains more useless (depending on cost of these super fast belts). Alternatives that that planet research could provide would be loaders and longer underground belts (alone).
• Probably get rid of the current stack inserters together with the filter inserters. Normal fast inserters can stack too with the research and stack inserters seem to be pretty useless in general. They make mostly train unloading and container to container transfer faster, but there are probably better options for that. Or at least swap the names.

Huh. I thought that mixed-quality stacks would be necessary because quality is hidden until it's researched, and you don't want to have items refusing to stack together because they're secretly different.

Before you research quality, nothing has any quality anyway (as you don't have quality modules). Quality items only generate as a result of machines with quality modules.

[Rbon]

This is the FF that finally made me create a forum account. I'm a big fan of barrels. I use them in situations where pipes are clearly the better option. So when I read this FF, the gears in my head started turning.

Under absolutely ideal circumstances, pipes can transport 12,000 fluid units per second (at that point it's actually just a line of pumps).
Barrels hold 50 units of whatever fluid you put in them, and if you have a stack of 4 barrels, that's 200 units, and if you use these new green belts, that's 60 stacks per second, or 12,000 fluid units per second!
That's the exact same as an absolutely ideal pipe setup! And as previously stated, that would be a line of pumps with no actual pipes between them. As soon as you introduce 1 pipe between a pump, that throughput gets halved.

Conclusion: in 2.0 I will be barreling every fluid, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.

[mattiplier]

I believe that the bulk inserters are great, and I think that the stacked items would look better if the items at the bottom of the stack looked smaller and the items at the top of the stack looked bigger (or vice versa)

[Panzerknacker]

This is the FF that finally made me create a forum account. I'm a big fan of barrels. I use them in situations where pipes are clearly the better option. So when I read this FF, the gears in my head started turning.

Under absolutely ideal circumstances, pipes can transport 12,000 fluid units per second (at that point it's actually just a line of pumps).
Barrels hold 50 units of whatever fluid you put in them, and if you have a stack of 4 barrels, that's 200 units, and if you use these new green belts, that's 60 stacks per second, or 12,000 fluid units per second!
That's the exact same as an absolutely ideal pipe setup! And as previously stated, that would be a line of pumps with no actual pipes between them. As soon as you introduce 1 pipe between a pump, that throughput gets halved.

Conclusion: in 2.0 I will be barreling every fluid, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me.

Nah man, I get the number games gets you excited but let's be honest, stacked barrels on a belt cannot possibly look realistic.

[SnowZyDe]

It looks very cool. It seems to me that one of the modders will be able to implement it. Very cool.

[TheKingOfFailure]

My biggest issue with these changes is the wording.

Stack inserters move lots (a bulk load) of items, but do not stack items

Bulk inserters do stack items when moving them in bulk.

It seems like the names should be reversed. Bulk inserters are unlocked first, which move more than 1 item at a time without stacking. stack inserters move them in bulk and STACK them on belts.

For old players we understand how stack inserters behave. But a new player would be confused.

[TheKingOfFailure]

My biggest issue with these changes is the wording.

Stack inserters move lots (a bulk load) of items, but do not stack items

Bulk inserters do stack items when moving them in bulk.

It seems like the names should be reversed. Bulk inserters are unlocked first, which move more than 1 item at a time without stacking. stack inserters move them in bulk and STACK them on belts.

For old players we understand how stack inserters behave. But a new player would be confused.

[bman212121]

Adding a thanks for the changes and I'm glad they are coming!

I absolutely like the stacking and faster belts. Back in the .12 days you could get away with a single belt for something like iron plates, and split it multiple times to feed different assemblers. Then all of the resources counts starting changing and the numbers to build things went crazy. So you had to build things in massive scale to progress the game. I don't expect this to solve that but I'm hoping it changes the balance of the "scale up / scale out" problem people keep talking about to where you don't need to build 100 clones of something to keep it busy. What's neat is that the new belt type fully stacked is slightly more than 5 express belts, so you should be able to compress a 4 lane express belt back into a single belt. That will bring back some of the disorganization since you don't need to carve out a massive area to run several belts in tandem, so it becomes feasible to snake a solution to a logistics problem without just saying never mind and throwing it at robots because it's not worth the hassle.

[floven1]

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
PURPLE INSERTERS GONE NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
love the change otherwise

[Brathahn]

Dark magic or not, how would you reasonably draw 5 barrels on top of each other? Items like these have been "conveniently" left out this dev diary.

Psh, simplest thing in the world:

i want this in the game

[BattleFluffy]

This is very exciting news, and a great resolution to the bots vs belts problem.

However the fully stacked items on high speed belts looks pretty weird to me. I am colorblind so maybe that affects things...but... the whole thing looks like it's sat still, and I'm hallucinating dark patches moving through the stationary items..

Some ideas to make it look better..
- Each item on the belt could have a randomized rotation
- Blur the items on these super-fast belts, to help sell the illusion of speed
- Intentionally slow to just below 1 full item per frame - so that the "phasing" effect moves forwards and not backwards
- Make visual variations for all other items in the game, same as with Ore... but I can understand why you might not be very keen on that idea..

[Neutronium]

Another observation:

> happily ever after
> crying bot

something's going on here.

I suspect they're setting the stage for some ultra-powerful bot types/capabilities for endgame (beyond what quality offers).

[morsk]

T4 belt color is too close to T3 assemblers. Maybe it will look good with new buildings we don't have yet. Something red?

It also looks "grimier" than T1-3 belts to me, although maybe this is to contrast with all the white inserters we'll have at endgame.