Friday Facts #402 - Lightspeed circuits

[mmmPI]

It's actually more trivial than that. You can just decide that any object with an y coordinate "higher" than the foundry's top position appears behind it, and everything else appears in front of it.

Is there a reason this can't be done? That looks simple enough.Why not render sprites from top (north) to bottom (south), the latter displaying over the former?

To me this is done already. Except for the moving parts of the inserters which are not updated in the same way as the terrain or buildings. ( Their basis is drawn "behind" if it's more North than another entity).
It doesn't adress the question of who gets priority between left and right, this feels bound to be arbitrary and still leave some visual artifacts from inserter clipping through things that have the same y coordinate.

[FuryoftheStars]

It's actually more trivial than that. You can just decide that any object with an y coordinate "higher" than the foundry's top position appears behind it, and everything else appears in front of it.

Is there a reason this can't be done? That looks simple enough.Why not render sprites from top (north) to bottom (south), the latter displaying over the former?

To me this is done already. Except for the moving parts of the inserters which are not updated in the same way as the terrain or buildings. ( Their basis is drawn "behind" if it's more North than another entity).
It doesn't adress the question of who gets priority between left and right, this feels bound to be arbitrary and still leave some visual artifacts from inserter clipping through things that have the same y coordinate.

You also can't just do an across the board kind of thing. Obviously belts and pipes should not be drawn over an inserter arm, and a regular assembler is debatable. Etc, etc.

[mmmPI]

Obviously belts and pipes should not be drawn over an inserter arm, and a regular assembler is debatable. Etc, etc.

Had it been obvious to me i would have made the boss harder the first time !

Inserter Drawing logic lvl 3001

inserter drawing logic boss lvl 3001.jpg (135.89 KiB) Viewed 2241 times

This one has radar , and inserter located north of belts to make it visible the situation where the arm shouldn't be drawn "under" the belt.

[mrvn]

It's actually more trivial than that. You can just decide that any object with an y coordinate "higher" than the foundry's top position appears behind it, and everything else appears in front of it.

Is there a reason this can't be done? That looks simple enough.Why not render sprites from top (north) to bottom (south), the latter displaying over the former?

Because an inserter with a slightly lower y coordinate than the foundry needs to appear behind the foundry but an inserter with a sligtly lower y coordinate than a rail needs to appear before the rails.

It's not (just) the y coordinate that is relevant but the y - height of object at y. Afaik in factorio this is solved with layers. There are low to the ground layers where e.g. rails live and high in the sky layers where the foundry lives. So factorio will first draw the low to the ground layer for each y, then the slightly elevated layer for the inserter arm and last the high in the sky layer of the foundry. This simulates the height of the object a bit. But there aren't enough layers and buildings like the foundry aren't split into sections of different hight. So it's imperfect.

[husky777]

The idea of wireless data transmission has been on my mind for years. I'm even surprised that the development team didn't come up with it much earlier. There is a lot of fun in laying wires. But it is tiring, and sometimes you opt for the simple solution of not laying wires, relying on simple things that are not based on logic.

I see one weakness here: sometimes you don't want to explore the map further at all, especially in favour of UPS in big factories. It would be nice to be able to disable radar exploration

[aka13]

The idea of wireless data transmission has been on my mind for years. I'm even surprised that the development team didn't come up with it much earlier. There is a lot of fun in laying wires. But it is tiring, and sometimes you opt for the simple solution of not laying wires, relying on simple things that are not based on logic.

I see one weakness here: sometimes you don't want to explore the map further at all, especially in favour of UPS in big factories. It would be nice to be able to disable radar exploration

If you are on a big factory, radar will be generating less chunks than the pollution cloud. Around anything polluting any reasonable amount more chunks are generated, than the radar reaches, at least in my experience.

[mrvn]

The idea of wireless data transmission has been on my mind for years. I'm even surprised that the development team didn't come up with it much earlier. There is a lot of fun in laying wires. But it is tiring, and sometimes you opt for the simple solution of not laying wires, relying on simple things that are not based on logic.

I see one weakness here: sometimes you don't want to explore the map further at all, especially in favour of UPS in big factories. It would be nice to be able to disable radar exploration

If you are on a big factory, radar will be generating less chunks than the pollution cloud. Around anything polluting any reasonable amount more chunks are generated, than the radar reaches, at least in my experience.

You need more efficiency modules and more forest.

[Ejsstiil]

Whoa! That's nice! What just hits me, this can be an opportunity for brand new VLAN support in Factorio! With some sort of n-port switch with tagging/untagging support, you'd be able to to create a real backhaul - a line carrying multiple IDs via single connection - a Trunk. With those switches on both ends you'd be able to tag/untag an ID on a port to send and consume, while other port can be set as trunk to carry the rest down the line.
Just an idea.

[Dial-up]

I still don’t see how to establish circuit network communication between the planets. There must be a simple and logical way, especially when "remote viewing" ignores the speed of light.

[gGeorg]

I see one weakness here: sometimes you don't want to explore the map further at all, especially in favour of UPS in big factories. It would be nice to be able to disable radar exploration

If you are on a big factory, radar will be generating less chunks than the pollution cloud. Around anything polluting any reasonable amount more chunks are generated, than the radar reaches, at least in my experience.

Radar not connected by a signal wire, works same as now.
Radar connected by a signal wire (red or green), has 1/100 electricity consumption (3kW) and work as data transmitter. (doesnt work as radar - do not reveal new chunks)

e.i. one entity offers two functionality.
Technically it is quite realistic. Send - receive data "antenna" uses the very same physical base as radar. In fact radar is more sophisticated antenna. It is also realistic, that data transmitting device consume less power than a radar. Military radars are power hungry devices, they emit so much power, that human standing close can be literally fried. Simply speaking military radar is a powerful microwave oven without lid. Contrary a wi-fi consumes few watts, can fry nothing.

How it sounds ?

[akasaka0330]

just wanted to say under this that more than once i used circuits on train lines to have my mining outposts request for repair packs or light oil as ammo