Factorio Forums

Hello peoples.

I'm aware that eventually there are plans for a RTS control hub technology for developed industries.

But I had an idea for just normal zoom or even further zoom.
ATM if I zoom out to maximum the area covered is pretty big, but there are a few downsides I'm noticing.

- Entities have the same detail they are just scaled smaller (I think)
- The maximum zoom out level is big enough that the amount of full detail entities on screen can possible cause a performance hit.
- The map is no larger then the maximum zoom out of the player, so it's not very useful. (IMO)
- The maximum zoom out and map does not cover a big enough area to get a good overview of my factory.

SO with all of these/my issues I thought of a nifty little solution, either as an addition to the eventual RTS control hub or as a separate ability.

-Give the player the ability to zoom out a bit further or switch to a overview map.
-At some point during zooming out start using a basic display mode (I had the idea that it would be similar to supreme commanders icon display when you zoom out)
-Reduced detail and scale to help display a really large area with less of a performance hit.

Here is an image I borrowed that gives a decent example of what I mean.


But additional to this I also imagined the terrain would get simplified. Way smaller resolution entities and very little if any animation.

So overall this level of zoom would be a very simplistic display meant to help get a general overview of your factory and it's goings ons.

I didn't really know how to form this post so sorry if it appears a jumbled mess..

+1

This might be a great feature with radar stations (which might enable the view or enable the additional icons on the view).
And this could be extended with a ressource-scanner (like the radar), which would enable to view ressource-locations on the large map.

That is a great idea but it won't be easy implementable.
First of all if I'm not mistaken Factorio uses Sprite-based approach for land rendering (Sprite = smal picture) where sprites are being placed near each other forming a grid like pattern.
Supreme commander on the other hand uses verctor based approach for land rendering (vectors form gridlike 2D mesh).
This second approach is much faster since all the scaling is directly done by graphics card. Also newest graphics card alows rendering of whole mesh by just isuing one command call while rendering same map with Sprite-based approach requires isuing as many cals as there are visible grid cels and this is the major reason for slowdowns.

So if Factorio developrs would wan't to implement something similar that Supreme Commander has they would first need to rewrite large portion of existing code but as far as I know the graphic engine that Factorio is using does support that.

Another thing that they would have to do for this is to make several different versions of existing textures (different level of detail). And this can take quite some time for their graphics artists to achieve. Not to mention that it would slow down the rate of adding new items into the game as their graphics artist would have more work to be done for each item.


Anywhay I would realy like to se something like this implemented in Factorio but I won't mind if they don't decide to implement this anytime soon as I understand how much work would this require.

Surely they would come up with some automagic way of turning existing textures into mipmaps?
Dunno how that work with animations and multi orientations, though.