Version 0.12.0

[FishSandwich]

If you don't like the new biters, you can mod them out of the game. That's the great thing with games that are modifiable, if you don't like it, remove it.

True.. but when a game is still in development that answer is really a bad answer. If most people really don't like a feature you should address it and not point towards the mods (not saying that the Factorio mods are doing that!)

My reply is correct regardless of if the game is in development or a finished product.

[Align]

[...]boils down to something like this:
"look, we added this new enemy!"
"Does it do anything interesting?"

Well, they specifically said it was simply to reduce pathfinding lag, so I'm not sure why anything else would be expected?

If you don't like the new biters, you can mod them out of the game. That's the great thing with games that are modifiable, if you don't like it, remove it.

That's a terrible response to criticism, especially of a game that's in development and needs all the feedback it can get.

[FishSandwich]

If you don't like the new biters, you can mod them out of the game. That's the great thing with games that are modifiable, if you don't like it, remove it.

That's a terrible response to criticism, especially of a game that's in development and needs all the feedback it can get.

Why is everyone getting their panties in a twist? I'm telling him he can mod the biters out, I'm not telling him his criticism is wrong.

[Oxyd]

Why is everyone getting their panties in a twist?

Welcome to the Internet.

[Align]

If you don't like the new biters, you can mod them out of the game. That's the great thing with games that are modifiable, if you don't like it, remove it.

That's a terrible response to criticism, especially of a game that's in development and needs all the feedback it can get.

Why is everyone getting their panties in a twist? I'm telling him he can mod the biters out, I'm not telling him his criticism is wrong.

Well, I guess you didn't intend it that way, but "if you don't like it, remove it" puts the responsibility on him, not the devs, which would be bad if it's legit criticism. Seeing your response though, it's probably down to tone, which is easy to misunderstand over the internet.

[MF-]

The question is if 0.11.22 can be updated at all. And the update package is almost as big as the full download anyway, so just download the instlaler. You don't need to uninstall the previous version, IIRC.

Ha, a perfect opportunity to fix all those oversized and "Known incorrect Adobe RGB profile" PNGs! If not already done, that is.

[MF-]

PS: FactorioBot might want to format the announcements better. Quoting this is.. hard.

• Changes
  • Improvements to circuit network wire connection. You can connect multiple wires of the same color to the same entity.
• Scripting
  • Changed LuaEntity::neighbours:
    For electric poles: the wire connections: {copper={}, red={}, green={}}
    For transport-belt-to-ground: the input/output entity it's connected to (or none)
    For entities with fluid - the entities the fluid connections connect to indexed by the fluid connection

Makes me wonder - will ::neigbours also allow probing for connections from the "Changes" section quote?

The ability to chain-connect chests, insersters and those new logic operator machines
might also require a special new kind of a "wire stand" pole to manage routing of a "pole-free" wiring.

PS: I guess PS could stand for both PostScriptum and PreScriptum?

[ratchetfreak]

PS: FactorioBot might want to format the announcements better. Quoting this is.. hard.

• Changes
  • Improvements to circuit network wire connection. You can connect multiple wires of the same color to the same entity.
• Scripting
  • Changed LuaEntity::neighbours:
    For electric poles: the wire connections: {copper={}, red={}, green={}}
    For transport-belt-to-ground: the input/output entity it's connected to (or none)
    For entities with fluid - the entities the fluid connections connect to indexed by the fluid connection

Makes me wonder - will ::neigbours also allow probing for connections from the "Changes" section quote?

The ability to chain-connect chests, insersters and those new logic operator machines
might also require a special new kind of a "wire stand" pole to manage routing of a "pole-free" wiring.

PS: I guess PS could stand for both PostScriptum and PreScriptum?

You can shift click a pole to remove the electrical connections, there's your "wire stand"

[MF-]

You can shift click a pole to remove the electrical connections, there's your "wire stand"

Obviously, but current power poles are too huge and high.
My one-wire-stand pole would be as low as an chest
and possibly wouldn't support power wiring OR even only one CCnet wire altogether.

It would be merely for anchoring the cross-machine CCnet connections to points on ground,
not onto points high up in the air.

[cube]

PS: FactorioBot might want to format the announcements better. Quoting this is.. hard.

How? Suggestions are welcome :-)

[voyta]

by learning to indent and linewrap (press quote to see the difference from what factoriobot posted)
I sure hope as a developer you know the immense value of whitespace eventhough it's the insignificant portion of your code Note that since I don't bbcode much, my choice of indentation and linewraps unlikely to be optimal, but still miles ahead of the bot fella.

• Features
  • The game is now finished by launching the rocket with satellite.
  • Added chain signals, they can be used to make more complicated junctions and stations without deadlocks.
  • ...
• ...
• Modding
  • Ambient sounds are specified as prototypes so they can be extended and modified by mods.
• Scripting
  • Changed all the identifiers/methods/events/parameters. Underscores are used as word delimiter (findentities -> find_entities).
  • Changed glob to global.
  • ...

[cube]

by learning to indent and linewrap (press quote to see the difference from what factoriobot posted)
I sure hope as a developer you know the immense value of whitespace eventhough it's the insignificant portion of your code :) Note that since I don't bbcode much, my choice of indentation and linewraps unlikely to be optimal, but still miles ahead of the bot fella.

• Features
  • The game is now finished by launching the rocket with satellite.
  • Added chain signals, they can be used to make more complicated junctions and stations without deadlocks.
  • ...
• ...
• Modding
  • Ambient sounds are specified as prototypes so they can be extended and modified by mods.
• Scripting
  • Changed all the identifiers/methods/events/parameters. Underscores are used as word delimiter (findentities -> find_entities).
  • Changed glob to global.
  • ...

Allright, I thought you meant some BBCode magic that I don't know about. I've added some spaces, but the formating of the last three changelogs is confusingly different, so we'll see what comes out of it :)

[MF-]

Yes, that's what I had in mind. Thank you both for taking care of it.

The format you used for 0.12.4 looks good
perhaps with an two more newlines before each sub-list?

Code: Select all

[/list][*][b]Bugfixes[/b][list]

↓

Code: Select all

[/list]

[*][b]Bugfixes[/b][list]

Reason: I know I want to quote a line from "Modding", so I need
to locate that header. The paragraph-like extra space helps with that.

EDIT: Oops, newlines there would produce newlines in the rendered output.
I see you made some clever choices there not to mess the output up.
Is there even a way of separating the paragraphs? Right now I don't see one.

[cube]

Yes, that's what I had in mind. Thank you both for taking care of it.

The format you used for 0.12.4 looks good
perhaps with an two more newlines before each sub-list?

Code: Select all

[/list][*][b]Bugfixes[/b][list]

↓

Code: Select all

[/list]

[*][b]Bugfixes[/b][list]

Reason: I know I want to quote a line from "Modding", so I need
to locate that header. The paragraph-like extra space helps with that.

EDIT: Oops, newlines there would produce newlines in the rendered output.
I see you made some clever choices there not to mess the output up.
Is there even a way of separating the paragraphs? Right now I don't see one.

12.4 blog post was not done using the changes that I made -- the deploy script crashed right before doing the post, so kovarex did it manually :)

[EditorRUS]

Items on transport belts don't go off the belt at the end, so the transport belt has
to go directly in front of the required inserter.

Oh god, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is the worst idea ever. Not only does it break a lot of old factories and forces people to get rid of old habit of not putting a belt in the end of a line, it is also just simply not realistic. How do you even imagine this? A belt somehow doesn't throw whatever on it onto the ground/next belt and just magically makes an item to be on the same square as the belt is?
Apart from that the update is awesome, I like new things (though I have yet to learn how to use combinators efficiently)

[voyta]

Oh god, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is the worst idea ever. Not only does it break a lot of old factories and forces people to get rid of old habit of not putting a belt in the end of a line, it is also just simply not realistic. How do you even imagine this? A belt somehow doesn't throw whatever on it onto the ground/next belt and just magically makes an item to be on the same square as the belt is?
Apart from that the update is awesome, I like new things (though I have yet to learn how to use combinators efficiently)

Come on, realistically belt doesn't stop after throwing off just single item. It will keep spinning until the pile of materials jams something. Or it is a belt designed to not throw items off the belt, having some latch at the end, or a sensor, and then it will stop items just like the 0.12 version does.

[FishSandwich]

Items on transport belts don't go off the belt at the end, so the transport belt has
to go directly in front of the required inserter.

Oh god, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is the worst idea ever. Not only does it break a lot of old factories and forces people to get rid of old habit of not putting a belt in the end of a line, it is also just simply not realistic. How do you even imagine this? A belt somehow doesn't throw whatever on it onto the ground/next belt and just magically makes an item to be on the same square as the belt is?
Apart from that the update is awesome, I like new things (though I have yet to learn how to use combinators efficiently)

It was a necessary change to fix all of the belt related bugs that pre 0.12 had.

[The Lone Wolfling]

I didn't really want to post this before doing a playthrough in 0.12. Now that I have: consider my voice added to those who dislike the 0.12 belt mechanics. For me, it changes belts from interesting to bland. There are a lot of interesting things that you can no longer do. (It also makes no logical sense why adding a belt facing away from an inserter can suddenly make the inserter able to pick up items)

[ssilk]

In general I like the new belt behavior. They are much, much, much more consistent than before. Before the rules depended on things like: is it placed on even or odd tiles, is it upwards or downwards, is it Monday or Tuesday. Now you can plan ahead. Their behavior is now much more reliable (*).

But indeed: they could reimplement such tweaks, like inserters not taking from belts pointing away, but why? If someone does - and some will do - they fail without good reason: most players are not going that deep into the zoom to see the differences. I mean: I don't see a useful game-play in most of such nice ideas. For example: I'm so glad that the curves are now have the same speed as the straights.
Such tweaks make sense if you zoom in deep enough and watch. But the general depth of the game is not that deep.
Maybe you can explain more examples? because I think your example is a seldom case.

(*) I would wish that for inserters, too. For example when taking from the same assembler, which inserter is preferred?

[The Lone Wolfling]

The difference is one of, for lack of a better term, gratification.

With the old belt mechanics, there was a nice curve of diminishing returns. You could get fairly good (either throughput or compactness) relatively easily, and/but to squeeze out that last little bit you had to use interesting/odd tricks. But at the same time, you generally could squeeze out that last little bit, if you put some thought into it. There was a distinct distinction between something that was put together quickly and one that was put together for space (using tricks like the ones I showed) and one that was put together for throughput (using things like splitters for belt corners).

With the new belt mechanics, there is no such curve, and no such distinction, give or take. Give or take, if it works, it's optimal. Instead of "I can almost squeeze this in. Hmm... If I do this odd sequence of weird belt tricks I can squeeze it in! Yay!", it's "I can almost squeeze this in. I can do this and this to squeeze it in... Wait, that's under the old belt mechanics. Under the new ones...? Bleh, not going to happen".

(Even things like inserter priority out of assemblers. Used to be, you could prioritize compactly with that.)

For me, it takes belts from interesting to uninteresting. Or rather, it removes a large chunk of the puzzle-solving that makes it fun for me.