Friday Facts #131 - Roadmap shuffle

[Escadin]

So if you know a good C++ programmer

I'm just only about to start my "Performance programming in C++" course but man would I have loved to join you!
Guess I can start modding the shit out of this game in the meantime...

[Chaoseed]

Underground pipes and belts can also be built the same way as poles in 0.13:

...Wait, what? What does that mean? Electric poles? You have to place electric poles one at a time, right?

[Zeblote]

Do people not read the tips that pop up at the beginning? I'm pretty sure placing poles was one of them

[Nemoricus]

I like a lot of what I've read in this update, but there's one thing I'm curious about.

Will trains be able to make decisions about which stations to visit without the player having to manually assign all of them? IE, if I want my trains to ship iron, can I tell them to visit stations that have a surplus of iron and then ship it to stations with a deficit without having to explicitly assign all of my iron-producing and consuming stations to their schedule?

[provet]

Looking forward to it!

Also my best guess regarding why fluid wagon tanks won't appear in .13 are that the devs want to do them much better than the mod(s).
like:
*Able to show liquids without mouse hover. (just like with the stationary ones)
*Have a better way to refill/empty than just placing electric pump near the tracks (Like an actual liquid off/on-load station-thingy)
*Different graphical colors on the wagons dependent of things like content.
*The wagon being an actual moving thing, and not just a stationary liquid tank that teleports onto the same spot as the wagon.
*Graphically different than the usual wagons.
*New cool features. (filters, combinator logic etc)
*Bug testing (so they work as intended upon release)

So it's not just as simple as to just add them to the base game cause mods exists with them already. The devs will do them better and more integrated than the mods have!

[Creat]

Great FF again, getting more and more impatient about 0.13...

I do have a comment about the achievement-icons though: I assume that the framing is copper, silver and gold. But copper and gold are way too similar. If you only saw the copper icon by itself (not next to the gold one), it would be hard to to tell if it was actually copper or gold.
So I hope you revise the circle-colors a bit, but nevertheless they are looking great, can't wait to earn them

And "Native mod portal integration" is probably the single best item in the that list of awesomeness. I really want to be able to subscribe to my mods so they're always updated. Wherther it's via steam workshop or another way (that works with the noDRM client) doesn't matter to me.
I do hope I'll be able to subscribe to a long list of mods that are kept updated and that I still can decide which mods to enable in game independently. Keeping my mods updated has turned into quite a bit of effort, even though it hasn't quite reached Kerbal-Space-Program-Levels (thank GOD for CKAN) it's still half an hour every couple of days (or weeks)...

[Rseding91]

Looking forward to it!

Also my best guess regarding why fluid wagon tanks won't appear in .13 are that the devs want to do them much better than the mod(s).
like:
*Able to show liquids without mouse hover. (just like with the stationary ones)
*Have a better way to refill/empty than just placing electric pump near the tracks (Like an actual liquid off/on-load station-thingy)
*Different graphical colors on the wagons dependent of things like content.
*The wagon being an actual moving thing, and not just a stationary liquid tank that teleports onto the same spot as the wagon.
*Graphically different than the usual wagons.
*New cool features. (filters, combinator logic etc)
*Bug testing (so they work as intended upon release)

So it's not just as simple as to just add them to the base game cause mods exists with them already. The devs will do them better and more integrated than the mods have!

Indeed. Also graphics - there's only 2 graphics guys and they have limited time to draw models

[SaintFlow]

Don't wanna be a party pooper but.. No Endgame incentives on the horizon even huh? :/ goddamnit. I mean, Quality of Life improvements as well as bugfixes are really important, but I'd love if they don't forget the people who like to spend the most time with the game. So many awesome ideas and things in their heads a year ago and now....oh well, gotta stay patient I guess. at least we still have modding for now!

[steinio]

Great FF again, getting more and more impatient about 0.13...

I do have a comment about the achievement-icons though: I assume that the framing is copper, silver and gold. But copper and gold are way too similar. If you only saw the copper icon by itself (not next to the gold one), it would be hard to to tell if it was actually copper or gold.
So I hope you revise the circle-colors a bit, but nevertheless they are looking great, can't wait to earn them

And "Native mod portal integration" is probably the single best item in the that list of awesomeness. I really want to be able to subscribe to my mods so they're always updated. Wherther it's via steam workshop or another way (that works with the noDRM client) doesn't matter to me.
I do hope I'll be able to subscribe to a long list of mods that are kept updated and that I still can decide which mods to enable in game independently. Keeping my mods updated has turned into quite a bit of effort, even though it hasn't quite reached Kerbal-Space-Program-Levels (thank GOD for CKAN) it's still half an hour every couple of days (or weeks)...

Yeah instead of silver and gold it should be coal, iron plate and copper plate

[ps666]

Oh no! Why so late? Around the 1. June i go to the matrix forever (my Oculus Rift arrives) . I don't know if i play 2D games anymore

[Ekelbatzen]

Isn't "graphical gui" kind of redundant? It would stand for "graphical graphical user interface" then.
But otherwise, good news

[Koub]

lancar wrote

[quote="lancar"]I hope you guys can find some good additions to the team.

On the subject of icons, I went back to play factorio again after a long break and got to get a feel for the new tech icons. I'd seen them before in an FFF but it's still a bit of a different thing to see & use them in-game than on a summary screen on the website.

The result?
I was... confused.
The icons are extremely pretty, make no mistake. They're almost works of art in graphics quality and attention to detail...
...so much that they all blended together into a big mess before my eyes.

The old placeholder icons were not great, but due to their simplified nature they were significantly easier to distinguish from another at a glance.
I'm definitely not saying you should re-design new ones, but I think they could use a few quick tweaks to make them more easier to sort on the tech screen.

For example, color the top-left corner of the icon with the color of the highest research packs required for it - this would make it much easier to see which techs can be researched right now, and which needs the next tier(s) of science packs. It would also provide some extra "oooh!" feeling when you see techs with a purple tag. Purple is mmo-code for epic stuff, after all

Armor already use a good way to make themselves stand out from the other techs with the black silhouette of a man in the icon, and this kind of easy-to-see effect symbol is something I'd like to see added to some of the other techs as well to classify the different kinds of things you can research.
The damage up and fire-speed up upgrade for weapons, for example, currently use a targeting reticule and stopwatch art, along with red and blue tint (respectively), to indicate which does which. However, the abundance of red and blue in all the other tech icons diminishes the latter and the extreme detail of all the art blurs the former. I believe these could be improved with symbols that're easier to differentiate, like plain non-stylized up-arrows instead. Like the black armor-mod icons, they need to not be artistic so as to make it easier for the human eye to spot them.

I also think that techs could be categorized with some sort of marker that indicates which "tree" it belongs in (logistics, production, military). This would make it easier to find the area you wish to focus on when the box pops up.


Of course, all this might just be pointless when the proper research tree is released, but I figured I'd air my thoughts about it anyway.
As for the achievement icons, they're looking mighty spiffy I especially like how they remind me of actual trophies.[/quote]

That's exactly what I felt too : even made a post some time ago here : viewtopic.php?p=126047#p126047
I'm glad I'm ntot the only one who prefered the quite schematic previous tech icons to the new fancy but overloaded research icons.

[Ghoulish]

I am looking forward to this

Graphical gui redesign - one of the big things that just had to be done sooner or later, we will definitely talk about it in detail in the future FFF

.
All the other things were revealed already except the "Ease of use", but this is something new and exciting!

Me too actually, never mentioned this when I posted before. I was a little worried that the devs were going to put off big UI changes until later in the development cycle, focusing on content or bugs more. I'm most happy the update is incoming as I was never overly keen on the Windows 95 look.

Epic update all round.

[Venatos]

3 of the 4 postponed things allready exist, there is virtualy no work for you involved to implement them.
not sure how you plan to alter the cargowagon length without changeing the viewing angle tbh.....
realy hope you get reinforcements soon, with the behind the scenes optimisations and multiplayer takeing up so much time, there hasent realy been a lot new toys for actualy playing the game these last years....

[edvardm]

Seriously why fluid wagon pushed back? I do not understand what could be so complicated? as for me much more difficult spider.

I have to agree with devs; especially as there is already a mod for fluid wagon, it does not need to be that high priority. Given it works, have not tried. I usually use barrels to deal with that issue.

[Zeblote]

Isn't "graphical gui" kind of redundant? It would stand for "graphical graphical user interface" then.
But otherwise, good news

I guess it means "graphics update for the gui", as in they're changing the look?

[Mikrotherion]

Ah. nice. I'm really curious about the train additions, since trains are great once they work, but a PITA to get to work properly, especially in larger bases. And without the FARL mod.. no, I don't want to think about that.

Sending all programmers I know your way, although they already have jobs, so probably no use to you.

[indjev99]

Why don't you take the Minecraft route? What I mean by that is you should have some snapshots where only some of the features of the update are implemented. That we can enjoy the new features (the ones that are nearly finished) and also test them, while you are working on the rest. Of course these snapshots would not be the default update, but only for people who want experimental builds.

[jockeril]

Why don't you take the Minecraft route? What I mean by that is you should have some snapshots where only some of the features of the update are implemented. That we can enjoy the new features (the ones that are nearly finished) and also test them, while you are working on the rest. Of course these snapshots would not be the default update, but only for people who want experimental builds.

But that's exactly what they are doing the 0.13 will be experimental versions for those that want to checkout the new features... when 0.12 came out the stable version was 0.11.22 and if you didn't want to experience the bugs/problems/desyncs you used that ad didn't mark "experimental versions update"...

[zlosynus]

lancar wrote

I hope you guys can find some good additions to the team.

On the subject of icons, I went back to play factorio again after a long break and got to get a feel for the new tech icons. I'd seen them before in an FFF but it's still a bit of a different thing to see & use them in-game than on a summary screen on the website.

The result?
I was... confused.
The icons are extremely pretty, make no mistake. They're almost works of art in graphics quality and attention to detail...
...so much that they all blended together into a big mess before my eyes.

The old placeholder icons were not great, but due to their simplified nature they were significantly easier to distinguish from another at a glance.
I'm definitely not saying you should re-design new ones, but I think they could use a few quick tweaks to make them more easier to sort on the tech screen.

For example, color the top-left corner of the icon with the color of the highest research packs required for it - this would make it much easier to see which techs can be researched right now, and which needs the next tier(s) of science packs. It would also provide some extra "oooh!" feeling when you see techs with a purple tag. Purple is mmo-code for epic stuff, after all

Armor already use a good way to make themselves stand out from the other techs with the black silhouette of a man in the icon, and this kind of easy-to-see effect symbol is something I'd like to see added to some of the other techs as well to classify the different kinds of things you can research.
The damage up and fire-speed up upgrade for weapons, for example, currently use a targeting reticule and stopwatch art, along with red and blue tint (respectively), to indicate which does which. However, the abundance of red and blue in all the other tech icons diminishes the latter and the extreme detail of all the art blurs the former. I believe these could be improved with symbols that're easier to differentiate, like plain non-stylized up-arrows instead. Like the black armor-mod icons, they need to not be artistic so as to make it easier for the human eye to spot them.

I also think that techs could be categorized with some sort of marker that indicates which "tree" it belongs in (logistics, production, military). This would make it easier to find the area you wish to focus on when the box pops up.


Of course, all this might just be pointless when the proper research tree is released, but I figured I'd air my thoughts about it anyway.
As for the achievement icons, they're looking mighty spiffy I especially like how they remind me of actual trophies.

That's exactly what I felt too : even made a post some time ago here : viewtopic.php?p=126047#p126047
I'm glad I'm ntot the only one who prefered the quite schematic previous tech icons to the new fancy but overloaded research icons.

I agree, the icons should be icons, not photo-realistic pictures. The purpose of icons is that they should simplify the object in a way that it is really easy to understand. When I was playing, the research was quite confusing. Later you get used to it but you still mostly read the text description to decide what to research. My suggestions instead of labels would be to have four filters in the top part of the window for all science packs, so one could easily display which techs can be researched with the currently produced science packs.

Sadly this is not only the problem of icons but the general graphics problem of Factorio. Everything is very gray, looking very similar, which makes the game very hard to understand. Players will get used to it but the graphics remains very ugly. When I was playing a few month ago again, I was showing it to several friends who were visiting me, and the first reaction always was: "the graphics looks very ugly". And since Factorio's graphics has many sprites, we cannot even hope for customs skins which would change it (as in say Minecraft). It is really funny that the replacement graphics in the oldest versions of Factorio was much more understandable (but quite ugly).

Btw. since Factorio is suppose to be about automation, will someone after years finally remove the "bug" that blueprints disappear after some time. It is fucking annoying when you can't set up some project and let the robots to build it for two three hours. There is absolutely no reason for blueprints to disappear ever, so why to have this functionality there at all? When some part of the factory gets demolished, I really want to have ghosts there so that they will be rebuild or at least I know what was there. Why should they disappear?