Satellite Lifts Fog of War

[pruby]

So just launched my first satellite... and immediately thought "what did I do that for?". While the animation is pretty nice, it seems pretty pointless - I preferred getting a train going to "winning" the game.

A quick search turns up a lot of complicated ideas about what you can do with satellites, and a few mods that add these, but it would be nice to have a better reason for doing what you're doing in the vanilla game.

Would it be technically feasible to simply cancel the fog of war, making the map fully visible? If there are limits here, could it be done for a radius around the rocket launch?

[Hannu]

Normal discovering creates entities (biters, trees, ores, etc.) to discovered chunks. Creating and maintaining them consumes CPU time. However, it would be possible to just calculate the terrain when player watches the map like the map editor does, but do not activate chunks really by creating the entities. In my opinion it would fit very nicely to the late game phase.

[Tekky]

I was also very disappointed when I launched my first satellite and all I got was a "You win!" message and a counter that increases every time I launch another rocket. I found this counter to be nothing else than annoying, especially since I couldn't even turn it off without a mod.

Therefore, I fully agree that launching rockets should have some proper advantage, such as the ability to use them as a weapon or for trade with other planets for rare resources, or, as you suggested, for scouting. Without such an advantage, I have no incentive to build them at all.

Would it be technically feasible to simply cancel the fog of war, making the map fully visible? If there are limits here, could it be done for a radius around the rocket launch?

Since the size of the map is unlimited (unless you explicity created one with a limited height or width) and more of the map is generated "on demand" (i.e. whenever you discover new territory), it is not possible to reveal the entire (infinite) map. Doing so would require a computer with infinite memory and hard disk space, since the size of the savegame file would also be infinite.

However, it would be technically possible to provide the player with a way of increasing the area of the generated and revealed map at the push of a button, once he has launched a satellite. Also, it should be technically possible for the map to be generated and revealed in the map view, as soon as you look at it, as forum user "Hannu" has described in his post above. However, I'm not sure if the LUA modding API allows for this, since I am not familiar with it. If not, then the Factorio source code would have to be changed to allow for this.

Normal discovering creates entities (biters, trees, ores, etc.) to discovered chunks. Creating and maintaining them consumes CPU time.

As far as I know, maintaining entities should not be a problem for the CPU time, since most entities will be inactive. And also creating these entities should not be much of a problem for the CPU, unless you generate and reveal vast areas of the map at once. The main problem I see with map size is not CPU, but rather memory usage and savegame file size (which means autosaves will also take longer).

[Nich]

Add laser turrets to the recipe and let lasers rain from space on anything that attacks you

OP did say fog of war. Unless I am confused everything already discovered is covered by fog of war unless covered by the short radar coverage. I think you are thinking of the fog of unknown (not sure what to call it) Everything covered by fog of war is already calculated otherwise bitters would not do anything unless you can actually see them.

[torne]

I don't think the biters do anything unless the chunk they're in is active. Chunks covered by radar (the short range that keeps the map lit up) are active, but chunks that have nonzero pollution are also active.

So, if the satellite kept all the discovered chunks active, that would reduce UPS since there would be more biters pathfinding/otherwise acting.

[Kane]

I think it be nice to maybe have it show key information on the map. Like vehicle locations, train locations, etc without the need to remove the fog of war. Maybe even the future say an incoming attack would then show the biters on the map even if it's fogged out letting you know something is happening.

i feel like breaking fog of war would bring too much information and should be controlled.

[Hannu]

As far as I know, maintaining entities should not be a problem for the CPU time, since most entities will be inactive. And also creating these entities should not be much of a problem for the CPU, unless you generate and reveal vast areas of the map at once. The main problem I see with map size is not CPU, but rather memory usage and savegame file size (which means autosaves will also take longer).

It depends on situation. I thought the very late game situation when the whole world is filled with huge biter bases because it is typical situation for me after couple of hundreds of hours. As far as I know, all existing biters are always active in Factorio. They are simple and stupid, but hundreds of thousands of them would use significant amount of clock cycles. But maybe memory consumption would be even worse problem.

[torne]

As I said above, I believe biters are only active when they're in an active chunk (lit up by radar, or having nonzero pollution). Biter pathing just for them milling about at their bases has been mentioned as a significant consumer of CPU time, though, so even if only some of the biters are active it can add up to a lot.