Friday Facts #425 - Behind the legs

[mmmPI]

Or Tempest. It will be rising.

Sandstorm !

[Koub]

I like the new animations (both the "buggy" and the "not buggy"). I must admit I haver never played enough endgame to actually use a spidertron, or even make one, so I don't feel how different the new spidertron is when I don't see it side by side.
I also like also how these multi legged things give me the creeps - I really don't like whatever has more than 4 legs, especially spiders.

[Aquilo]

Try teaching Pentapods to walk with both legs at once.
1-3, 2-4, 5-2, 1-3, 2-4, 5-2
Like "making a wave". Should be hypnotizing.

[jamaicancastle]

I find a limit of one pollution type per surface as very limiting. It means that we cannot make mixed enemies planet, as some of the enemies would ignore local pollution completely (because it isn't their type).

It's an unfortunate limitation, but I don't see a way around it that's performant. A gas diffusion model like Factorio uses for pollution has a lot of moving parts, especially when your pollution cloud spans as many chunks as most late-game factories do. They could improve performance by simplifying the model (for instance, they could blob all contiguous chunks containing polluting machinery into one source, sum up its pollution, and dump it on all chunks in a radius all at once) but that would remove a lot of the charm and emergent gameplay of the current cloud mechanics, and I'm not sure it would be worth it.

Fulgora - Robot Warforms - ???

My money's on some kind of electroreceptive enemy, so it attacks your lightning collectors and power plants first. Maybe the tesla turret is extra effective against them because it not only attracts them, its shots also "blind" them.

[Phauxstus]

Thunder !

How is thunder a pollution type? That's an environmental hazard, not something you produce...

I was thinking maybe cultural desecration pollution, robots getting angry at you ransacking the archaeological sites of their builders/victims
Or maybe anti-pollution? Since a lot of your resource extraction on the planet involves cleaning up oil spills and debris, maybe something would prefer the planet stay a barren death heap.
Electric or electromagnetic pollution was thrown around on some other forums but I think if the planet is already a constant storm nothing would care about your activity in that area. Maybe your EM footprint starts to disrupt whatever balance existed on the planet and the storms increase in strength, which is a similar loop to the pollution->evolution of biters and pentapods. Obviously it would still be disappointing if the storms were the only "enemy" on Fulgora as this might indicate.

[aka13]

I think I agree that the old Spidertron movement looks better. Works great for the Pentapods, doesn't look nearly as good on a robot. It's kind of twitchy and jerky. It's lost some of what made mechanical and cool.

So regarding the twitching/jerking: that's my bad. The video I uploaded to FFF actually contained a bug that was later fixed, but I had forgotten this fact at time of writing. If you're curious what the Spidertron movement looks like now, I uploaded it here: https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... smooth.mp4

Looks great, thx for sharing!

[BrainlessTeddy]

That was actually a really interesting FFF. But one thing about the spidertron. I see how you made it bend its legs instead of stretching them but the new animation kinda creeps me out. I think I like it. but we'll see

[Shadow_Man]

I think I agree that the old Spidertron movement looks better. Works great for the Pentapods, doesn't look nearly as good on a robot. It's kind of twitchy and jerky. It's lost some of what made mechanical and cool.

So regarding the twitching/jerking: that's my bad. The video I uploaded to FFF actually contained a bug that was later fixed, but I had forgotten this fact at time of writing. If you're curious what the Spidertron movement looks like now, I uploaded it here: https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... smooth.mp4

Ugh, it's like a rock fell off my soul. Thank you!

P.S. How about a PLD that shoots flying enemies?

[arcosapphire]

Spiders are evolved insects, and the rear 6 legs are operating as above. The front 2 legs are converted from antennae, and they're added to the 2 groups as well: all legs are alternated.

Spiders are not evolved insects. Spiders are arachnids, and arachnids did not evolve from insects. In fact, among arthropods, you can't really get further from insects than arachnids. Arthropods are divided initially into two clades: chelicerata and mandibulata. Spiders (plus other arachnids, as well as a couple of other things like horseshoe crabs) are in chelicerata. Insects (as well as other hexapods, the myriapods, and even crustaceans) are in mandibulata. So even crabs and barnacles are more closely related to insects than spiders are.

As for the claim that the front two legs are converted from antennae, do you have a source? I've never heard that and I can't find anything that says so.

[bobucles]

Those chonky bois are so big! It's exciting that simple walls won't be effective, those sort of combat mechanics help to make each planet feel more unique.

You can really feel the engineer's "F this planet" vibe at the end of the video. Yeah, Gleba is definitely getting paved.

[mmmPI]

Thunder !

How is thunder a pollution type? That's an environmental hazard, not something you produce...

I was thinking maybe cultural desecration pollution, robots getting angry at you ransacking the archaeological sites of their builders/victims

How is that better as a pollution type ? x)

I was thinking, the more you produce / use electricity, the more you charge the air, and then the environmental hazard, like thunder or sandstorm occur more frequently requiring more of those tower that capture it.

That was considering pollution for a planet where there may be "no" ennemies. Instead the adversity would be the planet itself/environment reacting to the player directly/ through weather intensifying. Rather than through more ennemies.

To compare with pollen, or smell, that can attract Gleba fauna. In other planet maybe "other harmful things" are attracted/ generated by player actions, and need to be kept in check.

[wizcreations]

I think I agree that the old Spidertron movement looks better. Works great for the Pentapods, doesn't look nearly as good on a robot. It's kind of twitchy and jerky. It's lost some of what made mechanical and cool.

So regarding the twitching/jerking: that's my bad. The video I uploaded to FFF actually contained a bug that was later fixed, but I had forgotten this fact at time of writing. If you're curious what the Spidertron movement looks like now, I uploaded it here: https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... smooth.mp4

IMO, the old/original leg motion still looks way better. The mechanical movement more resembles a robot.

[Tertius]

Spiders are evolved insects, and the rear 6 legs are operating as above. The front 2 legs are converted from antennae, and they're added to the 2 groups as well: all legs are alternated.

Spiders are not evolved insects. Spiders are arachnids, and arachnids did not evolve from insects. In fact, among arthropods, you can't really get further from insects than arachnids. Arthropods are divided initially into two clades: chelicerata and mandibulata. Spiders (plus other arachnids, as well as a couple of other things like horseshoe crabs) are in chelicerata. Insects (as well as other hexapods, the myriapods, and even crustaceans) are in mandibulata. So even crabs and barnacles are more closely related to insects than spiders are.

As for the claim that the front two legs are converted from antennae, do you have a source? I've never heard that and I can't find anything that says so.

OMG, you're right. I don't know where I have my information from. It seems I picked it up in my youth and never questioned but thought it's common knowledge. Sorry. I just read the Wikipedia articles about both, and you're right, spiders are no insects. It seems I thought spiders are insects, because they appear so similar in many ways, but they aren't - they're different. The walking style I spoke of is probably somehow unrelated to this, it just depends on how many legs the creature has.

[bobucles]

How long will it take before the 5 foot walkers are modded into pink spongebob dude?

[GregoriusT]

How long will it take before the 5 foot walkers are modded into pink spongebob dude?

you have just sped that one up drastically.

[yert527]

I think the FFF walker video should be fixed with the new one, at least edit the post to remove the video. That looks horrible and a lot of people might not read it or will go fixated on that and not anything new.

Also I agree that laser's should be able to target the Bio-Missiles to cause them to spawn their squid early.

[Skellitor301]

While reading about the search algorithm for leg placement, something came to mind when looking at the different patterns used and the solution used. Is the heading of the spidertron being taken into account with this search algorithm? Cause I can see an argument be made for a bit of extra efficiency when the direction of travel influences the search algorithm and the area it searches.

One idea that comes to mind when considering this is instead of using a branching search, I figured something like a raycast to certain points would probably make finding a viable location easier with a bit of logic put behind how the raycast search is performed. The idea that came to mind was start with doing a raycast of the heading and seeing if a collision is made. If it is then step the leg group like normal in that heading.

If not then I'd utilize the cardinal and intermediate directions, i.e. N, NE, E, SE, etc. So we'd start by checking 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, and 315. Utilizing the heading of the spidertron, you can determine which of these directions to start based on which one is closer to this heading. Example, if the spidertron is traveling with a heading of 156 the closest direction it would start with is 180. The raycast would check the distance from the center of the step to the furthest a leg could go with the spidertron stretching out. If there's no collision detected, it would go to the next closest heading from the initial heading 135, check that, and keep going until either a collision is made or all 8 directions don't find a result. Since most cases at this point are across shores this would cut back search substantially to generally 4 searched directions, at most 8 (at the current stage) depending on how far away from the heading the collision is. At that point, letting the spidertron step out to the usual distance it would step in that direction would be ideal, if it's a back leg then the grid coordinate closest to the collision location. But we also do have other unchecked coordinates in the 4x4 quadrant we've identified as having a viable location.

If we want to further refine this, we essentially will reduce the grid search size from the 8x8 to ideally 1/8th of that size by cutting the grid into 8 pie sections aligned to the 8 searched directions. We determine the slice to search by having one of its edges be along the direction the collision was successful in, and the other edge closest to the initial heading. We can then use 2 or 3 more raycasts to refine the direction pointed from the search center point and the 3 edge points of our initial grid, aka the crust of our pie slice . We would start with the middle raycast and then the next one from that closest to the initial heading, and if we find less than 2 collisions then we check the final raycast for any collision. We should now have at least 1 successful raycast collision coordinate at most 3. At this point, we basically have the collision closest to the initial heading of the spidertron and we check the furthest point along the raycast that is viable for the spidertron to step and choose the closest grid coordinate.

In the rare instance of the 8 initial raycasts failing to collide with anything, we perform the checks done before that point again only we're shifting the 8 points we are checking to the ones located half way between them. We essentially will continue the checks like normal from that point until a viable location is found, only we can safely ignore the already checked directions that failed and reduce the pie slices step in half. If all fail, then essentially we don't have a viable way to move forward.

I know that seems quite a lot, but if the logic is properly followed then a lot of the steps can be ignored or we find a viable spot to step early and we can skip the rest of the logic at that point. Yes it's a logic system that will build on itself, but overall on paper it should perform far less checks on average.

Steps in psudocode:

Click to view

1. Get the spidertron heading value (H)
2. Set 8x8 grid centered on the furthest distance the next leg can step. --relative coordinate for the grid center will be referred to as 0,0. Grid coordinates will refer to this for ease
3. Define a 2x2 array F
4. Get coordinate for heading H intersection with the edge of grid from 0, 0 and set to Xa, Ya
5. Raycast from 0,0 to Xa Ya
6. If raycast collides with a ground tile, set both rows of array F with Xa Ya and go to step 42
7. Define a value of C and set it to 1 used to determine the number of checks performed in current stage
8. Define a value of D and set it to 1 used to determine the stage
9. Define an array A of coordinates based on the initial 8 directional checks (Refer to image below)
10. Order the array A with the first closest coordinate to Xa, Ya to the furthest coordinate using the pythagorean theorem. --A²+B²=C²
11. Define coordinate check variable (Xb, Yb)
12. Using variable C to determine what row in array A to get the coordinates for the current check, we set these into Xb, Yb
13. Raycast from 0, 0 to Xb, Yb
14. If raycast collides with a ground tile, go to step 24
15. Add 1 to C
16. Repeat last 4 steps until either C=9 or D=3 and C=3
17. Add 1 to D
18. If D=4 go to step 44
19. If D=2 then redefine array A with the coordinates from the secondary checks
20. Else redefine array A with the coordinates from the tertiary checks.
21. Endif
22. Set C to 1
23. Go to step 12
24. Define coordinate values Xc, Yc
25. If C=8 then
26. Set coordinates Xb, Yb to the coordinate values at row 8 of array A
27. And set Xc, Yc to the coordinates at row 1 of the array A
28. Else
29. Set coordinates Xb, Yb to the coordinates in array A at row C
30. and set coordinates Xc, Yc to the coordinates in array A at row C+1
31. Endif
32. If D=2 then
33. Define array B with array A
34. Set array F in the first row from values Xb, Yb
35. Redefine array A with the grid coordinates between Xb, Yb and Xc, Yc --Refer to image below. Essentially we're populating the array with the 3 coordinates that are found between the current initial check coordinate and the next one. This one will basically cover the second and third checks
36. Endif
37. If D=3 then
38. Set array F in the second row from values Xb, Yb
39. Redefine array A with the grid coordinates between Xb, Yb and row C of array B --Refer to image below. Essentially we're populating the array with the 1 coordinate that are found between the current initial check coordinate and the next one. This will cover the tertiary checks
40. Repeat the raycast steps with array A
41. Go to step 12
42. Find the coordinates from array F that are closer to Xa, Ya and set Xa, Ya to that row's coordinates
43. Send the spidertron leg to travel to Xa, Ya

Likely to have some mistakes in the psudocode but I hope it gets the idea across

click to view image

[Phauxstus]

How is that better as a pollution type ? x)

It was joke, I put smiley faces on the end.

And yeah I can see them going with the EM pollution increasing storm power thing, but again that would be rather disappointing. Since you can 100% lightning proof a part of your factory with a lightning rod, which are a passively functioning building, the obvious and trivial solution would be to simply spam them everywhere and then pollute to your heart's content.
That would obviously not be very exciting, so I hope that even if that is a thing there are still actual enemies you have have to shoot.

[mmmPI]

How is that better as a pollution type ? x)

It was joke, I put smiley faces on the end.

I did that too !

And yeah I can see them going with the EM pollution increasing storm power thing, but again that would be rather disappointing. Since you can 100% lightning proof a part of your factory with a lightning rod, which are a passively functioning building, the obvious and trivial solution would be to simply spam them everywhere and then pollute to your heart's content.
That would obviously not be very exciting, so I hope that even if that is a thing there are still actual enemies you have have to shoot.

Well often times players suggestions are quite disappointing when comparing to what the combined power of the devs can create . I thought last time that biters on Fulgora could be a bunch of robotic spiders that would be responsible for the extinction of the previous life form and attack players based on electricity, like pollen here. But since we have Pentapods here, i don't think so anymore. I think it would be too similar leggy creatures. But maybe the leg logic is used somewhere else in diguise
I could go with it, but also with maybe a flying or a swimming one ? Not sure about a burrowing one, as it was revealed no discontiguous pathfinding 'yet'. Maybe each planet has ennemies with a different number of legs x).

[Molay]

I find a limit of one pollution type per surface as very limiting. It means that we cannot make mixed enemies planet, as some of the enemies would ignore local pollution completely (because it isn't their type).

It's an unfortunate limitation, but I don't see a way around it that's performant. A gas diffusion model like Factorio uses for pollution has a lot of moving parts, especially when your pollution cloud spans as many chunks as most late-game factories do. They could improve performance by simplifying the model (for instance, they could blob all contiguous chunks containing polluting machinery into one source, sum up its pollution, and dump it on all chunks in a radius all at once) but that would remove a lot of the charm and emergent gameplay of the current cloud mechanics, and I'm not sure it would be worth it.

Fulgora - Robot Warforms - ???

My money's on some kind of electroreceptive enemy, so it attacks your lightning collectors and power plants first. Maybe the tesla turret is extra effective against them because it not only attracts them, its shots also "blind" them.

Could they not keep the current simulation, but could they not divide it's frequency, i.e. often it does the calculation, by the number of "pollutants", then just simulate one at a time? Or would that not amount to the same savings, due to memory-stuff? (I figure it doesn't take much space in memory, but it could be enough to matter)