Friday Facts #346 - He who does nothing, breaks nothing

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-346

[Earendel]

If the character's position becomes invalid you could nudge them towards the nearest valid position.

[SuperSandro2000]

So they walking particles? The story stopped there suddenly.
To be continued...?

[SuperSandro2000]

If the character's position becomes invalid you could nudge them towards the nearest valid position.

And then someone finds a bug to port over the map? that would be so funny.

[Kyralessa]

In Czech we have a saying for which I have not found English equivalent. "He who does nothing, breaks nothing."

Yes! This is why I think all those dev shops that do broken-build shaming are making a mistake. It's easy to avoid breaking the build: You just avoid doing any useful work.

Besides, if the build never breaks no matter what anyone checks in, after a while you have to wonder whether you're even building the right things.

[Therax]

”Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

[Pippin]

Also, "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs". Although "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" is probably slightly closer to the intended meaning!

[Griffork]

Loved this! I'd be very happy to hear more bug stories in the leadup to release!

[conn11]

Waking around will also leave some subtle footprints in the ground, which helps connect the character to the terrain.

As if the footprint of your multi SPM factory isn’t enough.

Wouldn‘t visable footprints also imply visable vehicle tracks.
Like animated water and ...trees.

[Brambor]

I sometimes thought of it as an excuse. I connected quite a lot of things that we in Czechia seem to do differently from other parts of the world, In my mind, I connected them with Communism.
In this case, it was: The government is doing bad stuff and if you try to do something about it, you might regret the resulting prosecution.
Another example: I think that people don't look at one another in Czechia in public, mainly public transport, because they used to be afraid of snitches. And the unsociability didn't go away after the Communists did.

[Hiladdar]

Programmers pay homage to the show The Simpsons, where on the episodes, one of the characters, chain yelled, "You broke it! You broke it! ..." Besides that how can we fix something that is not broke. That is our job security. /s

Bugs happen, and this one will get fixed. Now to more serious stuff ascetics regarding dust trails. Over all I think overall it does make sense, and given that the character or vehicles will produce it should not be an issue for the UPS. The question is should there be different amounts of dust and how persistent should the dust be, based on how it is produced. One person running in theory should produce less then a wheeled vehicle which should be less then a tracked vehicle. What about terrain, will it affect how much dust is produced? The the final question, what about biters, will they also produce dust, especially when there is a large group making a run on the base defenses.

Will the amount of dust generated be scalable by the developers, similar to how steam / smoke currently is, in terms of persistence, size, and opulency?

Hiladdar

[someone1337]

Add the czech sentence to the text!

[melind]

I need to apologize first, because I understand what a terrible idea it is to provide suggestions when you don't have a lot of context to the heart of the problems or know what has been tried before.

It seems to me you could try solving the water and pathing problems by separating the movement/pathing from the visual display of terrain. For example, if you want players, vehicles, and bugs to ignore small patches of water, you could allow players to move/path as long as there is a block of land within 1 tile of them (directly underneath or in one of the 8 or 4 tiles next to them). Then you can render the pretty visuals which today seems to bias to placing land over water, but the player doesn't actually rely on these visuals for movement.

I think the worse case is you may have cases where the player moves over more water then you want, but should hopefully eliminate the other weird edge cases.

[TOGoS]

note: this assumes walkable tiles draw transitions over non-walkable ones, in case you are thinking of creating a mod with new terrain type that player won't be able to walk on.

Oh right. That's why I couldn't get my 'mountain' tiles working. There's an implicit assumption in the engine that the only tiles that will block the player are lack-of-ground (water, void), and never something that sticks out above it.

[Klonan]

note: this assumes walkable tiles draw transitions over non-walkable ones, in case you are thinking of creating a mod with new terrain type that player won't be able to walk on.

Oh right. That's why I couldn't get my 'mountain' tiles working. There's an implicit assumption in the engine that the only tiles that will block the player are lack-of-ground (water, void), and never something that sticks out above it.

I don't think so, its only really related to the transition collisions

You can set any collision mask to a tile and it will block player movement as it should

[Gergely]

The next obvious step after footprints are vehicle tracks. I'm not sure how to go about such a thing. Maybe you could make each of the 4 wheels of the car leave behind a circular 'patch' of darkened ground each tick, which when combined creates visually connected tracks. For tanks, treat the chainwheel's center as the drawing point and it would work.

Or a more expensive approach is that on each tick, draw a line from each of the four wheel's previous position to their next position with some width. This is probably a bit too complex to be worth it, but I don't know what sort of a challenge is too big for you guys.

[promaty]

visible tracks would be awesome

[irbork]

Footprints I love. Maybe make them a little bit more visible and stay on the ground for longer period of time. And then make tire tracks for vehicles

[darkfrei]

Why the vehicle does not leave trails / track after it?

[madpav3l]

Add the czech sentence to the text!

In Czech: Kdo nic nedělá, nic nezkazí.