0.16 changes

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Diablo
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0.16 changes

Post by Diablo »

Hi,

I really like most of the 0.16 update, however there are three changes I really dislike and I would like to request / suggest an option to, if we can't have a full roll-back on these changes which would be preferabele, have an option in the menu to turn these features on or off as we please.
Here are the three changes I would like this option for:

Cliffs -
They add no real value to game-play as they are solely there for aesthetic, and some would argue hinderous, reasons. That doesn't make the game more fun, it just makes it more frustrating as you now have to spend time dealing with arbitrary obstacles instead of designing great factories. Yes there are trees that also sometimes "block" progression but they at least serve a purpose. They provide wood, an easy to acquire fuel and building material, that you need to do certain early game things to progress. But later they are no longer a real obstacle as blueprints and robots make trees virtually a non existent entity. Same goes for rocks. However with cliffs, you don't have that. They will always be in the way of what you want to build as they cannot be conveniently removed by robots by just placing down a blue print or marking them for removal. Also they don't provide anything to be used in the game, giving their existence even less meaning. Unless you are building up to a 3D version of the game (or view) they make absolutely no sense.

Train destination decisions (aka Train stop penalty is applied when exiting the block with it instead of entering which should prevent searching for long paths just before destination train stop.) -
I have to admit I was somewhat confused by the phrasing here. But after testing it seems this means that trains will no longer decide to go to a train station with the same name if it is a seemingly arbitrary length away. As an example, my unloading area is still working fine (stations next to each other) and the trains go to which ever station is unoccupied at the time, showing that they are indeed capable of changing their destination based on station availability. However when it comes to the several copper mining stations I have all over the map, the trains have now apparently no intention of going anywhere but the closest loading area creating giant traffic jams and grinding everything to a halt.
This is very counter-intuitive to what you would expect a train to do and what they have always done in the past.

Concrete -
This one, admittedly, is a less important one but still important enough for me to at least mention it here. The only reason for a large site to be covered by concrete (irl) is the have a nice smooth surface to work on. Things don't shake around as much and, depending on the needs of the site, can have other beneficial properties like noise reduction, high liquid absorption coefficients or, the opposite, extremely low absorption rate for easy cleaning.
One thing it always has in common is smoothness. Having the concrete look like "normal" stones makes it much less aesthetically pleasing then the smooth look it used to have. And much less industrial-like. Concrete is supposed to have an homogeneous smoothed out look. That is it's purpose.

Thanks for reading and keep up the otherwise fantastic job you're doing.

Zavian
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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by Zavian »

Cliffs can be set to none in terrain generation. Doesn't that disable them? I view them as another design constraint which increases the variety in factory layouts. Which at least of for me is a good thing. (That said I'd have no objection to bots being able to use cliff explosives to remove them).

Trains. I think it was actually a bug fix that changed the train behaviour (0.16 changelog "Fixed that train arriving to station could give astronomically big penalty causing trains to go through weird places." viewtopic.php?t=54042). The behaviour you want back actually only worked because of that bug. Personally I never tried using stations of the same name spread far apart that way, because I never thought it would work. I always thought that the penalty for an occupied station was only supposed to be 2000 tiles, so unless stations were relatively close, I didn't expect it to work. That said I believe they have made the path penalty constants accessible to mods, so you should be able to get the old behaviour back with mods.

rldml
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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by rldml »

Diablo wrote:Train destination decisions (aka Train stop penalty is applied when exiting the block with it instead of entering which should prevent searching for long paths just before destination train stop.) -
I have to admit I was somewhat confused by the phrasing here. But after testing it seems this means that trains will no longer decide to go to a train station with the same name if it is a seemingly arbitrary length away. As an example, my unloading area is still working fine (stations next to each other) and the trains go to which ever station is unoccupied at the time, showing that they are indeed capable of changing their destination based on station availability. However when it comes to the several copper mining stations I have all over the map, the trains have now apparently no intention of going anywhere but the closest loading area creating giant traffic jams and grinding everything to a halt.
This is very counter-intuitive to what you would expect a train to do and what they have always done in the past.
We need something like this: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53792
The train-stop need a way to send a defined signal of it's own id to the circuit network, similar to the train id it can read and send to network (e.g. "Send your ID to network, use signal 'S'")

Additionally, trains need a option to drive to a station it get signalized via train-stop ("e.g. next Station: Read Signal 'S' from actual train-stop and drive to train-stop with corresponding id").

There are some mods that do similar things, but are way to complicated, because they do much more things than i really need, e.g. refuel logic, or stacking logic (That's things i wanna make by myself with the combinator logics the vanilla game offers).
The train scheduling/path finding system is a mess right now: we cannot determine a target precisely. Something like this suggestion i've written earlier would not forbid less effective methods to set up a train-system, but would allow to make it more efficient with the help of circuit logic.

Greetings, Ronny
Last edited by rldml on Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by Engimage »


rldml
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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by rldml »

PacifyerGrey wrote:Or this
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47695


Why not both? :mrgreen:

Zavian
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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by Zavian »

rldml wrote: The train scheduling/path finding system is a mess right now: we cannot determine a target precisely. Something like this suggestion i've written earlier would not forbid less effective methods to set up a train-system, but would allow to make it more efficient with the help of circuit logic.
If you want to determine the target precisely then you can name each station differently, or use the circuit network to disable the other stations.

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Re: 0.16 changes

Post by rldml »

Zavian wrote:
rldml wrote: The train scheduling/path finding system is a mess right now: we cannot determine a target precisely. Something like this suggestion i've written earlier would not forbid less effective methods to set up a train-system, but would allow to make it more efficient with the help of circuit logic.
If you want to determine the target precisely then you can name each station differently, or use the circuit network to disable the other stations.
Sorry to say that, but both is not helpful:

1. If i have to name every station differently, i have to set up for each station separate trains. That would solve the problem, but kills every attempt to automate the stuff more intelligent. In fact, it leaves the train-scheduling on a beginner level. Why even try to automate something, if you have to touch EVERY train again and again for the simple fact that your oremines deplete over time or you try to add a second smelter station or to change the way your rails run? The benefit to use trains is damaged under this circumstances... :/

2. Yeah of course. Makes sence if there is only two smelting stations on my map. But if you have e.g. many mining outposts it's simply unusable: If i want to send a train to the oremine you have to disable ALL other mining outposts. None of them could receive a train to send it's stuff to the smelter station while you wait for the first train to reach it's destination. At least, i can kill all other outposts, because they can never targeted with a train, unless the farest outpost is depleted. But if it's depleted i have to build another one. Additionally the target-problem trains have with 0.16 because of the train-stop-mechanic the OP mention earlier. This system sucks at so many levels, i can't even describe it properly... :(

Both is absolutely suboptimal. Both sucks. Both make the train system ineffective - without the chance to repair it. Even with some mods (LTN or Smarter Trains) - they doing much more than wanted - because they define EVERYTHING about trains, so you just can use it their way or forget it. That's not the way i want to play this game.

I want to have the option to build a smart train stacker by myself, and i want the option to send a train to THAT ONE train stop over there - without a hard coded scheduling, because next time the same train would be best to send to the OTHER train stop a step south of the stacker. Actually there is no way to tell the train to do that without dumb premises...

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