improved minimap/bigmap

[Tami]

I play games usually with Grass only settings, so no dirt, rocks etc, the reason is the minimap, its really hard to find objects if you have tons of different colors because of the terrain, it would be fine if there is an option to switch the map modues to show terrains and not show terrains, especialy dirt, rocks

Add an option to move the bigmap with the mouse instead of only keys, as far you zoom out, then the movement of the bigmap reduces to snail speed. As it is now, it seems the movement speed depends of squares per second. So if you have max zoomed out, its hard to c any movements.

If you have to expand your base because of lack of ressoruces, you will reach a point, where you have to move the map around a minute to reach a certain point. If you close the base because your charater get attacked and reopens the map again, you will have to move the map another minutes. I hope it explains the issue with endless map sizes and non skaling mapmovement.

[ssilk]

Yes, sometimes that could be very useful.
Some layers:

- terrain
- resources (incl. forest and fish)
- enemy
- train
- electricity (default off)
- the other buildings/belts
- bots (default off)

[Garm]

Would be also beneficial to change into map mode in editor when you zoom out too much: I have a decent computer and it stutters when i zoom way too much.

[slpwnd]

Would be also beneficial to change into map mode in editor when you zoom out too much: I have a decent computer and it stutters when i zoom way too much.

This is something we came across quite recently in the game called kronos http://battle-worlds.com. It looks really smooth & cool in their implementation. Something like that would be great.

[SilverWarior]

Would be also beneficial to change into map mode in editor when you zoom out too much: I have a decent computer and it stutters when i zoom way too much.

Yes you computer starts to stutter becouse Factiorio has tile based scene rendering. SO when you zoom out the shear number of tiles that needs to be rendered increases. And with this the number of cals that Factorio makes to the graphics card itself increases which causes reduced performance.

To avoid this developers would have to change the way how Factorio renders the ingame scene. I myself would suggest using 2D mesh with texture layering. This whay you only assign each ground type its own layer and only tell game which alpha value it should use for rendering these layers at certain location. The biggest advantage of this is that you can render whole layer with a single call to the graphics card as the graphic card can autotile the texture. Since you are able to control alphablending of these tiles you could easily get smoth transitions between diferent terrains.
The only problem is that I don't know if Allegro (graphical engine used by Factorio) does support rendering of 2D meshes.

[kovarex]

But the tiles have different variations, and in 0.8 also different sizes, so this wouldn't work.
On the other side, Factorio cashes the tiles and when you move around, it draws just the new part of the screen, the tiles are re-rendered for the whole screen only at start or when you zoom.
Entities on the other hand are rendered independently and the more you see the slower it can get.
The graphical card isn't the only problem there, there are many factors (the layer between The graphics card and the Factorio (Allegro) which isn't as optimised as I would expect, and I already had changed a lot of stuff in Allegro to improve the rendering performance and there are still things to do).
When you are already talking about allegro, we don't call the video card for every drawing, you would get fraction of the current performance this way. Allegro natively offers way to stack draw orders and send them in the batch.

[SilverWarior]

But the tiles have different variations, and in 0.8 also different sizes, so this wouldn't work.

Yes I'm aware of that. But with layering you could make large texture for each terrain thype. The texture itself can be larger than the area you are rendering the thexture to becouse you only show the part of the texture you require (sung alphablending or maping texture coordinates to 2D mesh vectors).
Now to get even more variations you could make several layers for each terrain and then blending together several different textures to form final look for each terrain type. So if you have different sizes of these textures the repeating patern size would be the Least common multiple of the textures width.

On the other side, Factorio cashes the tiles and when you move around, it draws just the new part of the screen, the tiles are re-rendered for the whole screen only at start or when you zoom.

So you are using chached texture on which you render the scene and when player moves you move existing part of this texture to new position and then draw the new part of it. That is a nice approach.

When you are already talking about allegro, we don't call the video card for every drawing, you would get fraction of the current performance this way. Allegro natively offers way to stack draw orders and send them in the batch.

Yes I know Allegro sends commands in batches to the graphic card itself but still reducing the number of this commands can improve perornamce quite a bit.
And the main reason why I mentioned the posiblity of using 2D mesh is becouse I have seen what performance gain you can achieve with it in my friends game.
At the begining he used tile based approach but later switched to 2D mesh instead. Nowadays he even makes use of shaders to get even better results. He even fakes terrain elevation by manipulating 2D mesh structure and aplying corect shaders.