Friday Facts #228 - High resolution turrets

[golfmiketango]

Lots of fermions flying around in this week's FFF

Just wanted to mention that the "cosmic ray" hypothesis can sort of be ruled out, if you have a statistically respectable number of save corruption reports coming from MP games hosted in the cloud, where obviously ECC memory is much more common than on consumer rigs...

Probably less relevant, but definitely more fun to think about in my opinion: if, you wanted to avoid a Poperian science problem where one random counter-example is supposed to "disprove" the hypothesis (which doesn't really work since, maybe some random cloud box just didn't have ECC ram for some reason) with enough save corruption bug-report data-points, you could figure out how strongly you can reject the null hypothesis that: "MP games hosted in the cloud are equally prone to corrupted save events as MP games hosted in end-user environments" by employing a χ² test. But probably there are not enough data points so I guess I'm just showing off my l33t st4tz skillz and/or mentally masturbating you by saying so

[E-37]

Actually very decent, when I looked at factorio, I did is looked at the laser turrets, "WHY IS THERE NO LASER BEAMS!?!?!??!, THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELIASTIC!?!?!?" well this is such a coincidence ;p

You do realize that laser beams have nothing realistic about them at all?

They do look significantly better then current version..

Well... some lasers are invisible. Think about the cheap laser pointers you can buy at the store. They have an invisible beam. Those are pretty weak though. Lasers are in use in production though and can be used to cut very hard materials so it isn't unrealistic that they could be used as a weapon. It would be awesome to have varying colors via the circuit network or some other way.

[Tricorius]

While you are revisiting them, how about finally unlocking vehicle grids and adding turret wagons? The arty can only do so much on its own. Would be super to have some turret wagons too... please?

Thanks for the best game ever! Keep up the excellent work.

+1

I'd love gun and flame wagons. Though I'm guessing its unlikely.

I would also like a robowagon. Especially if the bots can pull rails out of it and build out my rail network.

[Drury]

Actually very decent, when I looked at factorio, I did is looked at the laser turrets, "WHY IS THERE NO LASER BEAMS!?!?!??!, THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELIASTIC!?!?!?" well this is such a coincidence ;p

These new effects actually look very decent. I saw Factorio only recently, but when I looked at the laser turrets I thought "why are there no laser beams? Is this supposed to be realistic?!" Coincidentally, the issue is being resolved as we speak.

I tried to remaster this post, not sure if I kept the original spirit intact.

[Koub]

Omagahd those epic lazors. I'm really happy you decide to change the old "laser bullets" to these beams.

[AssaultRaven]

Wait - this update to lasers is potentially huge - will they deal their damage 'continuously' or still deal damage as more discrete pulses?

If this becomes continuous, then laser shooting speed will go away and lasers will essentially no longer have any overkill, which is effectively a huge buff. This isn't just graphical - it's a core mechanics update.

Even if they did make it pulsed, it would still look better to have the beams. (Altho that would still be an upgrade because of the travel time reduction, but hey, they're lasers, right?) I've suggested before to have them be beams that fire in pulses and make thunderclap-like sounds.

Speaking of, what's the situation with the new lasers' sound design?

[Krazykrl]

Actually very decent, when I looked at factorio, I did is looked at the laser turrets, "WHY IS THERE NO LASER BEAMS!?!?!??!, THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELIASTIC!?!?!?" well this is such a coincidence ;p

You do realize that laser beams have nothing realistic about them at all?

They do look significantly better then current version..

Well... some lasers are invisible. Think about the cheap laser pointers you can buy at the store. They have an invisible beam. Those are pretty weak though. Lasers are in use in production though and can be used to cut very hard materials so it isn't unrealistic that they could be used as a weapon. It would be awesome to have varying colors via the circuit network or some other way.

Seeing as how a blue biter technically reflects more blue out of the visible spectrum... I dunno if laser coloration in relation to biter color and biter resistances is necessarily needed (but it would be awesome to mod or create a scenario around.)

Randomizing the striking point of the lasers would be pretty neat, as long as it's a render-level non-deterministic thing that would never apply if someone isn't looking at it.

[posila]

Lots of fermions flying around in this week's FFF

Just wanted to mention that the "cosmic ray" hypothesis can sort of be ruled out, if you have a statistically respectable number of save corruption reports coming from MP games hosted in the cloud, where obviously ECC memory is much more common than on consumer rigs...

Probably less relevant, but definitely more fun to think about in my opinion: if, you wanted to avoid a Poperian science problem where one random counter-example is supposed to "disprove" the hypothesis (which doesn't really work since, maybe some random cloud box just didn't have ECC ram for some reason) with enough save corruption bug-report data-points, you could figure out how strongly you can reject the null hypothesis that: "MP games hosted in the cloud are equally prone to corrupted save events as MP games hosted in end-user environments" by employing a χ² test. But probably there are not enough data points so I guess I'm just showing off my l33t st4tz skillz and/or mentally masturbating you by saying so

As far as I remember every corrupted save we had was from single player game

[Oktokolo]

This FFF is funny: Cosmic rays as a probable cause for multiple cases of savegame corruption, fixing bugs as a cause for more crashes. I strongly suggest to stop accepting corrupt saves from the ISS and banning weed consumption at work. Cosmic rays are a pretty rare event behind our protective magnetic field and when fixing bugs makes the software less stable, you are clearly doing it wrong.
Race conditions (does not have to be in the code actually saving the corrupted state to disk) and other code bugs are common in all sorts of code. Go, hunt 'em down and take no prisoners

I like the new laser beams (although i prefer the machine gun turret) and turret sprites.

Don't think, there needs to be anything done regarding belt compression anymore though. Splitters do that job just fine and are pretty easy to use.

[bobucles]

Quick visual idea:
Have the "sharpness" of lasers affected by local pollution levels. So when a laser fires in clean air it seems hardly noticible, but when it fires in heavy smog it is very bright with a massive foggy blur effect.

I guess this leads into the next idea that pollution levels aren't really represented in a visual way. Take advantage of things like color desaturation and smog overlays to get that industrial feel!

Edit: Laser color or thickness might be affected by research. So damage or fire rate might step up through the color spectrum, affect brighness, etc.

[CakeDog]

As nice as highres turrets (and OH GOD YES BEAMZ) will be, the new base for the laser turret looks extremely plain and small, nevermind the complete absence of force masking on it. It also makes the popup animation of the turret stand out in a bad way.

In unrelated news, just how long has the 'lowres' chemical plant's shadow been completely blank/nonexisting?

[bman212121]

Yes, that would be good for checking integrity of zip packages on disk, which also sometimes get corrupted probably by Windows not flushing them to disk properly. The type of corruption I was talking about was corrupted game state, and we already check some things that previously caused lot of corruptions - for example the tile corruption in bug report I linked in the FFF was detected during saving and it prevented overwriting good save. But, it still just hides the problem, what I need is find source of the problem ... is it bug in our code? or is it just random HW glitch? Additionally, these checks make the saving longer, so we would like to add as little as possible and even remove existing ones.

Yes I definitely think it's great if you can find the source, but we'd certainly appreciate having additional protections in place to keep the saves from becoming corrupted. At least in the example it was good it wasn't overwriting the good save, I'd rather lose an hour of playtime than lose the entire thing. Obviously that's the point of the autosave, but I'm super paranoid about making sure I don't lose save data so I will create multiple different saves for the same map while going through it. One of my friends had 150+ hours on a map, and it would be bad if all of the sudden that one save got corrupted and it overwrote the last good save. I definitely don't mind waiting a few extra seconds for the save, or maybe even just having additional checks that run after the part that has to stop the gameplay to make sure it's going to work.

When you talk about it being easy enough to fix the saves right now, the one thing I definitely would like to add is that Factorio is likely going to be around for a long time. I still fire up SimCity 2000 from time to time (A game that is now 25 years old), so there are no developers around to help me should the game save corrupt. If you are building/using a tool which can help automate save game fixes, we'd likely appreciate if that were just tossed into the bin folder with the game executable, because if something does happen down the road it would be awesome if we had a way to correct the issue without losing the save. Ideally whatever is happening to them is flushed out and it's an ultra rare occurrence, but it would be awesome to know we might be able to bring them back from the dead.

[eradicator]

If the lasers are already going to be reworked, and given that for many people they form the main defense in mid-/-endgame i'd really like if they got a more "heavy" look both for the turrent and beam. The turrent looks extremely fragile currently as opposed to the heavily armored gun turrent. And the beam is imho to much of a quick red flashing line. For the beam it'd be nice if it had some sort of warm-up animation. I.e. first the muzzle of the turrent starts to faintly glow, then a faint beam is projected onto the enemy (leading beam) and then as more energy is put into the beam it slowly grows thicker and brighter. Also even more importantly the laser should also do the reverse when stopping to shoot, i.e. have it linger a bit in the air after killing until it finally fades away. And lastly the beam should not be switched off when retargeting, instead it should swing the beam over to the next biter, because the constant flickering really doesn't look that good.

Supreme Commanders "Monkeylord" had a really satisfying heavy laser animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alI5LphKOyg

Also from a purely visual perspective i think it would look nicer if the turrents didn't do absolute concentrated fire but instead some of the turrents shot at different biters, for example if every turrent shot at the biter that is closest to itself.

[molerat]

Question (to any who can answer) about the possible upgrade to a newer OpenGL.
Does the windows version use OpenGL, or one of the direct X's?

I ask because I looked it up after reading this, and my integrated chip only runs OpenGL 4.0 on windows, not 4.1. (Although 4.1 is apparently available on mac for this chip. Something something Drivers I guess?)

So I'm sure the reason for my concern is apparent.
Its all moot if it runs directx on windows though.

To any who are curious, its an intel HD4000.

[QGamer]

I'M SO HAPPY!

Finally, the light from the laser moves...at the speed of light! No more moving red lines that turn in midair to face their target.

I think the laser beam should be an instantaneous pulse lasting only 1 tick, doing all the damage at once, but the red line lingers, fading away for a duration about half a second. That way, you can see it fire, but the shooting speed upgrades will still have an effect. If the shooting speed was really fast, you might have 2 or 3 faint lines coming from the same turret--the air still glowing from the energy.

Anyway, it looks cool. And it travels at the speed of light. Thank you.

[skeller1982]

Hi, regarding the problems with macOS and newer C++ versions.

possible reason: the c++ stl library is usually shipped with the OS on mac, so if you use c++17 libary features in the game and have it running against an older stl you will run into problems. we had similar issues where i work and had to drop support for some older macOS version when switching to a newer c++ standard.

i also like your move to drop boost in favor of the std. while boost is a nice incubator and has some nice stuff in there i also prefer the std library when possilbe. From my experience boost should be used carfully and with some consideration to not run into problems when mixing with std later. For example assignment of a empty std::function to a boost::function will lead to a non-empty boost function (it wraps the std one) which will then crash when calling, despite the usual check.

[Nomadic Steppe]

Good ideas

Laser towers fire at different parts of the enemy's body
Laser towers shoot desynchronized
And that you can change its color would be funny.

[Nypyren]

RE: Corruption. At work I helped track down a race condition between threads that were updating/rendering the same entity at the same time. It manifested as our archer's bowstring triangles (and nothing else) stretching to 0,0,0 every few frames (which looked to me like bad hardware or an index buffer overflow, but the hardware turned out to be perfectly fine and the index buffer was a laughable 32 indices).

It's incredibly difficult to track down, too. If you guys use threads for anything that can affect this, I'd have someone thoroughly check those.

[Jon8RFC]

What's going on with the terrain here:

factorio_fff_2018-02-02.png (256.67 KiB) Viewed 6380 times

[Nemoricus]

This change to laser turrets may get me to actually use them, because that effect is pretty cool.