Train car length changes depending on orientation?

[Tev]

Not being able turn your blueprints sideways (you can rotate them by 180 degress) can be trivially planned around

Please enlighten me.

Meaning that you have to build a different blueprint for the second direction, or simply accept that the game doesn't support that mechanic. Its easy if you know about it already, but newbs will never know this due to it being uniquely counterintuive.

Yeah nobody reads tips and tricks (It should be added there obviously). Nobody ever reads wiki. Nobody ever figures stuff on his own.

It is not trivial however. Trivial would be just supporting rotation in the first place. But that would be as though this problem never existed, and in that case, it wouldn't even be called trivial, such that it wouldn't even be acknowledged as any different from any other blueprint.

What's not trivial about not planning vertical high throughput stations? Seriously just make stations horizontal, there, problem solved. When it seems like you don't have enough space going horizontally, make your stations elsewhere. What's so damn hard about that.

Rather moan (or better: do something about it) about poor newbie education system with unfinished wiki and not-enough tips and tricks in game. Make some tutorials. Fixing this would take such disproportionate amount of time from devs that I think it's just stupid to complain about such a little thing.

[imajor]

Fixing this would take such disproportionate amount of time from devs that I think it's just stupid to complain about such a little thing.

Please note that this is not a bug which needs to be fixed. This was a design decision made a while ago.

[Zeblote]

Fixing this would take such disproportionate amount of time from devs that I think it's just stupid to complain about such a little thing.

Please note that this is not a bug which needs to be fixed. This was a design decision made a while ago.

This is a design fail, not a decision. Factorio does not use an isometric projection, the wagons should have the same size regardless of rotation.

[Ranakastrasz]

Yeah nobody reads tips and tricks (It should be added there obviously). Nobody ever reads wiki. Nobody ever figures stuff on his own.

I certainly didn't. As in, I didn't find anything out about this for a long time. It was obvious to me from when I started messing with trains that train cars were something like 6.5 tiles long, or something, which threw everything off, which was really weird, but I never noticed the different between horizontal and vertical until after I started robots. Then I spent a lot of time reading about it, until I finally learned about this.
quote]
Rather moan (or better: do something about it) about poor newbie education system with unfinished wiki and not-enough tips and tricks in game. Make some tutorials. Fixing this would take such disproportionate amount of time from devs that I think it's just stupid to complain about such a little thing.[/quote]
I'm not sure how this would take a lot of time from devs. They almost certainly have a constant somewhere which says 1.4 or .6, or whatever the ratio is, and if you set it to one it would physically work as common sense dictates. After that, you would need to apply the same scalar to all of the train image files. I doubt it would take more than 15 minutes.

Please note that this is not a bug which needs to be fixed. This was a design decision made a while ago.

Doesn't change the fact that it is a highly questionable unique exception in the game, which does in fact restrict your options in a.... Non-intuitive way.

[Tev]

It was a poor design decision, but as a part of the design it's hard to change, and the benefit would be tiny.

I'm not sure how this would take a lot of time from devs. They almost certainly have a constant somewhere which says 1.4 or .6, or whatever the ratio is, and if you set it to one it would physically work as common sense dictates. After that, you would need to apply the same scalar to all of the train image files. I doubt it would take more than 15 minutes.

You're totally ignoring the backwards compatibility issue. And uglyfying graphics (remember, game will be polished for 1.0.0 release).

[ssilk]

Most simple solution: Kick out "train stop". Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal". Problem solved. Not nicely, but would work.

What I want to say is: Guys, don't hit your heads on stuff, that you cannot influence. The devs see this discussion and they have no solution or have one but are not sure, how it will work in the end (in any other case they would already have spoken here; it's clever, not to speak about it until you have a working solution).

But that may take time.

OFF-Topic: See problem about game start on an island. This problem is known since end of 2013. It is not that important, that it needs to be solved NOW.

The same is with the train length here: No need to solve it NOW.

[hitzu]

Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal"

and "train stop diagonal"

[Ranakastrasz]

It was a poor design decision, but as a part of the design it's hard to change, and the benefit would be tiny.

I'm not sure how this would take a lot of time from devs. They almost certainly have a constant somewhere which says 1.4 or .6, or whatever the ratio is, and if you set it to one it would physically work as common sense dictates. After that, you would need to apply the same scalar to all of the train image files. I doubt it would take more than 15 minutes.

You're totally ignoring the backwards compatibility issue. And uglyfying graphics (remember, game will be polished for 1.0.0 release).

Backwards compatability doesn't seem like a factor here. After all, a recient patch broke every single scriped mod until it was updated, which certainly disabled many games until they were updated. Sure, it was on the modder's end, instead of the player's end, but that isn't a huge difference.

As for the ugly graphics, I have yet to see anything that makes me think that is the case. I have seen someone make a rotating and distorting rectangle. While it clearly was distorted as it rotated, that would only be an accurate representation if we played top down. This is isometric (I think) meaning you would need to have an animation of a rotating rectangular prism, or, ideally, the existing train graphic. I don't think anyone other than the developers have seen what it looks like, unless this was the case back when trains were added in the first place.

Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal"

and "train stop diagonal"

Pretty sure you can't do that now, since train stops can't be placed on diagonals. That said, I have no idea how that would work out.

Most simple solution: Kick out "train stop". Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal". Problem solved. Not nicely, but would work.

I'm not sure how that would work. Even if it essentially acted as an inserter and moved stuff off of the train, after that, no matter what shape it is (if a chest or something similar) it wouldn't be able to unload/load at the same rate horizontal vs vertical, so would make no real difference. I can only assume I don't understand the concept.

What I want to say is: Guys, don't hit your heads on stuff, that you cannot influence. The devs see this discussion and they have no solution or have one but are not sure, how it will work in the end (in any other case they would already have spoken here; it's clever, not to speak about it until you have a working solution).

But that may take time.

OFF-Topic: See problem about game start on an island. This problem is known since end of 2013. It is not that important, that it needs to be solved NOW.

The same is with the train length here: No need to solve it NOW.

True enough, I suppose. It isn't a huge deal, but it is still an issue.

I still would like to know what it would look like.

[hitzu]

I have seen someone make a rotating and distorting rectangle. While it clearly was distorted as it rotated, that would only be an accurate representation if we played top down.

There wouldn't be any distortions at all, there even wouldn't be the train lenght problem if the graphcis were top down as the grid is.
To solve this problem you either should rework all the graphics or fix the world grid.

Pretty sure you can't do that now, since current train stops can't be placed on diagonals.

fxd

[Ranakastrasz]

I have seen someone make a rotating and distorting rectangle. While it clearly was distorted as it rotated, that would only be an accurate representation if we played top down.

There wouldn't be any distortions at all, there even wouldn't be the train lenght problem if the graphcis were top down as the grid is.
To solve this problem you either should rework all the graphics or fix the world grid.

Pretty sure you can't do that now, since current train stops can't be placed on diagonals.

fxd

The game would look rubbish with top down graphics. The isometric viewpoint is really important i my opinion.

----
True enough. However, I have no idea what benefit you expect to get from diagonal stations.
----
Use the built in spellchecker please.

[ssilk]

Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal"

and "train stop diagonal"

Train stops can currently placed only vertical/horizontal. Or is that a suggestion?

Most simple solution: Kick out "train stop". Introduce "train stop vertical" and "train stop horizontal". Problem solved. Not nicely, but would work.

I'm not sure how that would work. Even if it essentially acted as an inserter and moved stuff off of the train, after that, no matter what shape it is (if a chest or something similar) it wouldn't be able to unload/load at the same rate horizontal vs vertical, so would make no real difference. I can only assume I don't understand the concept.

The idea is: A new player gets immediately, that there is a difference between horizontal/vertical when talking about trains. And when you place a rotated blueprint, the train stop doesn't connect to the rail so the player sees very soon, that this isn't working like so - or that he needs to rethink it.

[Zeblote]

The idea is: A new player gets immediately, that there is a difference between horizontal/vertical when talking about trains. And when you place a rotated blueprint, the train stop doesn't connect to the rail so the player sees very soon, that this isn't working like so - or that he needs to rethink it.

So what you're saying is, the new player sees that trains don't work the way everyone intuitively expects them to do and something is wrong with them. And then has to find a way to work around it.

[imajor]

The idea is: A new player gets immediately, that there is a difference between horizontal/vertical when talking about trains. And when you place a rotated blueprint, the train stop doesn't connect to the rail so the player sees very soon, that this isn't working like so - or that he needs to rethink it.

Interesting idea, but I think it would do more trouble than it solves. For those who never make a blueprint containing a train station (I think with vanilla this is most of the players) it would be pretty confusing. They would say it is pointless to have two types of stations.

[Tev]

Backwards compatability doesn't seem like a factor here. After all, a recient patch broke every single scriped mod until it was updated, which certainly disabled many games until they were updated. Sure, it was on the modder's end, instead of the player's end, but that isn't a huge difference.

Eh . . . are you kidding? Seriously all you had to do was to update a mod. And modder used deprecated functionality, so really obvious it had to come sooner or later.

But changing way train stops work would require reworking many stations for every player on every load they want to carry on. And making train length universal would for some people introduce problems with signals in certain places (especially around train stops). You really think those are comparable situations? Oo

Just look at the hack that had to be done to enable backwards compatibility for new (0.12) turrets.

ssilk: that seems as counter-intuitive as current situation.

[imajor]

Eh . . . are you kidding? Seriously all you had to do was to update a mod. And modder used deprecated functionality, so really obvious it had to come sooner or later.

But changing way train stops work would require reworking many stations for every player on every load they want to carry on. And making train length universal would for some people introduce problems with signals in certain places (especially around train stops). You really think those are comparable situations? Oo

Just look at the hack that had to be done to enable backwards compatibility for new (0.12) turrets.

ssilk: that seems as counter-intuitive as current situation.

Do you think it would be hard to change this only to newly started games, and leave the current behaviour after loading an old file? I don't think so.

EDIT: Formatting

[Zeblote]

Second: |Wagons should have the same size in both directions| — this is impossible in the factorio world unless you want to physically stretch and shrink wagons while rotating them. Like this https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 37#p109337

What you're saying is:

1) This is not a square.



2) This is not a square.



2) This belt


is wider than this belt.



3) This machine isn't a square.




The projection can't have rules that apply only to certain objects. That leaves two options:

1) The trains are correct. Everything else is wrong.
2) The graphics are fine. The trains are wrong.

[hitzu]

What you're saying is:

1) This is not a square.

This is a square only if this is a circle and if these bars are actually floating in the air.

The projection can't have rules that apply only to certain objects.

Yes

That leaves two options:

1) The trains are correct. Everything else is wrong.
2) The graphics are fine. The trains are wrong.

No

1) Sprites are fine. World grid is wrong (not squares).
2) World grid is fine (squares). Sprites are wrong.

[dee-]

IMHO the sprites are completely irrelevant. There is no functional difference between this:


and this:




The game grid MUST be square, otherwise rotation of entities would not make any sense at all (3x3 entity on a 1x1/2 grid then would become 6x1,5 which is nonsense)

If we agree on this then it MUST strictly follow that, depending on a square grid with valid 90° rotations, trains MUST have the same height as their width -- game mechanic wise.


Now, if we project the quare grids a bit flatter to indicate some sort of visual perspective, then the GAME tiles are still square, because their mechanic is still square.

Under these conditions trains may appear vertically shorter and horizontally longer - but this is only a visual effect -- whereas in the current game trains are not only different from a visual aspect but ALSO from a gameplay aspect -- and this is clearly wrong

[imajor]

I don't supposed it is possible to make a mod which changes this?

[Zeblote]

This is a square only if this is a circle and if these bars are actually floating in the air.

I know you can do cool things like that, but it's not the point.

My point is factorio doesn't use isometric projection. Otherwise it would look like this:



We have isometric trains inside a game that isn't isometric. Basically there are two ways to fix it:
1) Leave trains. Change everything else.
2) Change trains to fit everything else.