Friday Facts #334 - New poison cloud animation, flying robot dying effect

[fishycat]

This looks excellent! I like the wibble-wobble of new poison cloud. Request gif at night with laser beams and poison cloud
Sure looks pretty damn awesome.
Also the new bot effects, like it a lot!


p.s. Is FactorioBot's post count frozen?

[Filter62]

Should add explosions when dead drones crash land, to mask the abrupt transition from live graphics to dead graphics.

I agree here!

[Chapeau-Claque]

...we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail.

Crazy, for lack of a better word, is good!

[Deadlock989]

How do you get the spinning-bot-particle to create the corpse when it hits the ground? I've gotten everything else working ...

[Klonan]

How do you get the spinning-bot-particle to create the corpse when it hits the ground? I've gotten everything else working ...

There is a new 'ended_on_ground_trigger_effect` for the particle.

[Deadlock989]

There is a new 'ended_on_ground_trigger_effect` for the particle.

Most excellent.

[warlordship]

I like the new bot debris, but it feels so sudden. I almost feel like the bot corpses ought to at least bounce once before landing perfectly still. And I do vote for a small effect on crash, with perhaps a short duration (3-4 seconds) cloud arising from the corpse.

As for the poison, I also love that you made it appear to have depth by having the tops of the biter nests not covered by the effect. Impressive foresight on that.

[ownlyme]

and you still haven't added a grenade arc
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71441

[Oktokolo]

I like the new bot debris, but it feels so sudden. I almost feel like the bot corpses ought to at least bounce once before landing perfectly still.

That bots are damn heavy. They are way more heavy than they look like. That is because they use an antihiggs matter core to stay in the air. That core is two orders of magnitude heavier than the bot itself. As soon, as the control logic dies, the core turns around and gravitates to the ground, pinning the bot down.
Ever wondered, why the bots need energy to move fast but not to fly? They use the energy to overcome the antihiggs matter core's inertia. The core itself constantly provides some energy But most of it is needed to control it. So they need some extra energy to move reasonably fast...

TLDR: You would not expect a solid bar of lead to bounce either.

[Nova]

I like the changes. Small suggestion: make the rotation of the dieing robot a bit slower. Looks a bit too hectic right now. Maybe also some smoke effect so the change from "dieing robot" to "remnant" doesn't look as jaggered?

[Drury]

and you still haven't added a grenade arc
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71441

You're probably already aware, but throwing this out for others too
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/KS_Combat

[LenaWalsh]

Should add explosions when dead drones crash land, to mask the abrupt transition from live graphics to dead graphics.

This might be a cool idea, I love how heavy they feel in crashing down and hitting the ground so suddenly, but the transition between the particle effect and stationary graphic feels a bit janky.

[Deadlock989]

The abrupt transition might be partly to do with the very artificial test scene in the gif. Bots tend not to just drop out of the sky like that. I've been playing with the spinning-bot-particle method for my own modded bots and when there's projectiles and explosions and debris and biter spit flying around as well, you don't really notice it.

[Mgis09]

I like the changes.

Crashing robots should damage things on which they land

YES and yes! This would add so much to the game. But would it be possible to implement/track/sync? no idea...

make the rotation of the dying robot a bit slower. Looks a bit too fast. Maybe also some smoke

Agreed.

Should add explosions, to mask the abrupt transition ...

Not needed, in my opinion.

Also, does anybody uses slowdown capsules? To me they are underpowered.

No way I'm using them. Maybe will try soon. But there is no upgradable bonus for them, is there?
Same thing with discharge remote.... ofc pistol, shotgun, and regular cannon shell.

[nosports]

this looks very cool all....

i hope there is the possiblity to grab the remenants, at least for a mod

and i hope it would be possible to deploy the battle bots via roboports just like the cargo/construction bots. at lest this game is about automation, so an automated battlebot deployment ist just about right......

[posila]

The abrupt transition might be partly to do with the very artificial test scene in the gif. Bots tend not to just drop out of the sky like that. I've been playing with the spinning-bot-particle method for my own modded bots and when there's projectiles and explosions and debris and biter spit flying around as well, you don't really notice it.

Pretty much this.
As every other FFF we show some effect which is meant to improve overall visual feel of the game, people start overanalyzing it, and start pointing out all the imperfections, because the effect is the only thing they can see. When you run around fighting biters, you don't really focus your attention on bots dropping out of sky. You can see it's happening, but don't focus on it long enough to "shortcuts" in the animation.

[posila]

and you still haven't added a grenade arc
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71441

Artists want grenades being thrown on an arc, and I promissed them to do it before 1.0, and I forbid them to use fluid stream for that, due to stream being optimized for long life time and large amount of particles, and for single particle it too heavy duty, mainly due to it creating bounding box along entire trajectory of the stream.

Things like this are pretty low risk, so they can be worked on a week before 1.0.

[orzelek]

Is there also a combat robot rebalance planned to go with new nicer crashing?
I don't recall all the threads but combat robots were kind of meh usually or you need to spawn 100 of them or so which requires lots of research and resources. And by the timw you can do that there are usually better options available.

[McDuff]

Can combat robots be deployed like logistic robots...? Pretty please...?

[conn11]

Can combat robots be deployed like logistic robots...? Pretty please...?

I do like the current mechanic for combat robots. They do fit the factorio theme of initial scarcity, overcome by mass production.
But manually deploying 100+ by stack of 5 is tedious. Maybe shift + LMB for spawing as much as the robot follower count allows and the default pathway for replenishing crashed casualties.