Friday Facts #345 - Unit group collision mask & Artillery shell particle

[fighting.dreamer]

The new shell particle effect looks very good (I agree with others that with small delay it will be perfect).

I also played more lately and sounds starting to feel good again (belts, inserters, trains), assembly is still a bit off (like its working without lubrication).
Here you can watch short video of "Danish troops firing CAESAR", reloading system have one genuine factorio inserter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFSZigjP5ew&t=113.

[mrudat]

As far as I can tell, the particle looks to be made from the artillery shellcartridge with the projectile removed, though, I think that we need a new projectile sprite; in the video, it looks like the projectile is dragging the case along, which is now also being ejected by the cannon.

[pickles30]

nice update

[GottZ]

artillery shell drops should be part of the reloading cycle as others mentioned already.

[Superstrider]

Spent artillery shell casings probably shouldn't shoot out the side like that. I'd suggest having them come out underneath the front similar to a 40mm Bofors in a locked breach and ejection chute style, rather than what looks like a blowback/recoil operation side ejection (casings that big would put people in the hospital or cause property damage for sure).

I didn't think there was an ejection port on the side the shells came out either.
love to have the addition though.

[webkilla]

I don't like the idea of bugs able to cross water - the natural barrier that offers is a life-saver for most of my games.

water crossing bugs.. oh please gods no

[daemonworks]

If units are differentiated by their ability to cross different sorts of terrain, shouldn't it be the case that they /don't/ group together? In the case of a mixed group of water and normal biters, grouping them just negates the water-biter's ability to cross water. It seems like they should split into two groups, the land group and the water group so as to not break the entire point of whichever type has more movement options.

Though if there's code for carrier variants that grant their movement type to the group to allow land biters to cross water or whatever, then grouping together would make sense as it would extend, rather than negate, the feature.

I mean, it's not going to have any impact on the way I play, but if somebody wants bugs that cross water in their game, those bugs should cross water...

[Tesse11ation]

Awesome work as always, Wube. I hate to be picky, but I do have one gripe with the artillery shell casing animation: the timing.

Yeah, it's awesome that we can see a casing get ejected, but it happens too soon. In the animation shown, the casing ejects at the exact same time the firing occurs. In game, it looks like this:

1. Fire the round; expended casing is ejected
2. Barrel/bolt slides back, reaches its apex, and springs forward again; a new round is chambered (loop back to step 1)

But in a real artillery piece -- or even most handheld guns that use blowback operation -- the casing is ejected as the bolt slides back to its furthest point, when it "bottoms out". If you were to imagine that a magazine being held from the inside of the artillery turret is auto-loading the next shell (which it absolutely is, since... how else could it fire that quickly?), the REAL order SHOULD go like this, assuming it has ammunition remaining:

1. Fire the round; recoil causes the barrel/bolt to slide back
2. As the barrel/bolt reaches its apex, the expended casing is ejected
3. As the barrel/bolt springs back into place, a new round is chambered (loop back to step 1)

So, feasibly, by offsetting the ejected casing particle by about half of the full cycle's animation, you can capture this effect and I can't imagine it would be too much more expensive computationally. It would pretty much happen the moment the barrel is fully collapsed from recoil. Speeding it up at the same rate as the firing while maintaining this offset will work no problem.

I know this seems really specific. However, I would find it hard to believe for the fellow gun nuts out there with OCD that this isn't painful to watch. Unfortunately I'm the type of person who can have a game where I build a rocket silo using my bare hands, shove it into my pocket, run around with it, and throw it on the ground again while being swarmed by giant alien bugs -- but the moment I see an animation like this my willing suspension of disbelief is shattered. (I'm sorry!)

Thanks for reading!

[Jesperhk]

Please add a flying biters

YES! to this, like biter evolution, they will come like swarms in endgame where you need SAM turrets (to use some of the heavy rockets) to kill them, or lightning towers/turrets (they use alot of power) but it could be so cool to some of these old (red alert) lightning towers, where the lightning spark to close enemys, and the upgrades would involve more damage and longer lightning jumps.

Sry for my crazy idears, i just love tower defence games xD