Radars are lying

[FrozenOne]

All their sector scanning in progress...and guess what, they don't, there was a new creeper base in their outer scan area. So I suggest, make this scanning toggleable, either the radar sees only the inner area, and consumes much lower energy (as they are now the biggest consumers in my base), or in the "on" setting it repeatedly scans the more distant lands and shows if new creeper bases appeared. And it would be good if it could use green modules. Radars need your love!

[ssilk]

Bzzz...
Radar is only actual in the inner area. The outer area is just "discovered" and if not scanned once more then meanwhile could the natives be there.

Well, this is indeed sometimes misleading, it would be good to see, how old the last scan of the chunks are, for example by getting darker and only the lakes, mining sites etc. remain.

[Hazard]

I'd certainly appreciate it if Radars would 'rediscover' old chunks once they've discovered every chunk in range. Right now chunk discovery is worthless when it comes to estimating enemy positions and forces, as biters, spawners and worms can easily hide in already discovered chunks that were declared clear, and because of that actively misguides a player, leaving them vulnerable from a direction they didn't anticipate because as far as the map showed, there was nothing there to worry about.

[SilverWarior]

If you would go and disover that areay by yourself (walking or driving there) thre would still be chance that biters have built base there later and you still won't be able to see it.
The ability for radars to scan ahead is only intended for making player finding more resources easier.

But as it was mentioned I think it would be nice if you could enhance your radar with modules:
- speed module would inrease the scaning speed of the radar
- productivity module would increase active scaning range (always revealed area)
- effectivity module would decrease energy consumption
So if you could double or triple your radars active scanning range tht should be enough for yout to see biter bases that are close enough to be considered verry dangerous especially if you would go and build such radars on your base edges.
But since biter attack can actually happen fron any biter base (usually atack are launched from closer ones but not necessary) it is quite imposible to predict from where they will hit you.

Anywhay when planning your base defence it is usefull to know that biters would try to first attack the part of your base that is generating the most polution. So building most of your defences around this part of the base is good.
But it could still happen that while trying to reach your most polutant part of your base biters would cross other parts of your base so they will wreak havoc there.
I have ralized that in my recent gameplay where I'm mass producing effectivity modules for the first time (before I was alway crafting them manually and using them sparecly).
So I had a nice base where I have been producing most polution with my iron ore mines. And since that section of the base was attacked often I had built good defences there.
Then after I started my mass production of effectivity modules I first started equiping my mines with them. This lovered polution levels generated by that part of my base considerably. And in the end that part of my base was generating much less polution than other parts.
So now biters started attacking other parts of my base which had much more poor defences or none defences at all. This nearly destroyed me as biters destroyed my power supply. Luckily I had a few solar plants on the other side of my base. So athleast I managed to kill those biters by quickly placing a few of laser turrets nearby.
After that first thing I did was rebuilt only two of my steam engines and quickly run to my mines and remove all efectivity moduls qout of them so my mine section of the base became again the section generating most polution.
Then I slowly rebuilt the damaged part of my base.
Finally I started equiping effectivity modules in rest of my base first and finally done it in mine secton of my base. So that during all this time my mine section part of the base was the one generating the most polution.
But now I'm increasing defences in other parts of my base becouse those mines wont last forever so sooner or later rest parts of my base would be the ones generating the most polution and atracting most creepers attacks.

Also you need to realize that the game creats some map chunks outside of your explored area. So even if there would be no fog of war (you would see whole discovered area) the biters could still launched an atack from the side where you won't see ny of the biter base becouse there might be biter base just behind the discovered areaa.

[kovarex]

Just to clear it, when the radar finishes the sector process, it finds the chunk in the area that wasn't scanned for the longest time and rescan it.
In the start these are the chunks that are not charted at all and they get discovered.
Once the radar discovers all the chunks in the area, he will start updating chunks again.

So it is always possible, to build more radars, to get more frequent update of the surrounding area.

[FrozenOne]

Oh so it does rescan? Hm I'll give him more time then, but i'll keep an eye on him, because so far it doesn't seem so.

[FrozenOne]

No way, i built about 30 radars, waited more than 10 minutes, but the enemy base that (if i go there) is just behind the inner scan horizon still didnt appear on the map. Either enemy expansions come to existence only when player walks to them, or radars dont rescan properly.

[SilverWarior]

Using editor I just build a simple testing scenario (80 radars and needed power suply for them).
It took about 5 minutes for radars to fully reaveal my surroundings (all chinks in their revealing area) and at the time there were only three alien bases visible.
About five minutes later I could already see some new enemy bases being shown on the map.
So this means that radars actually do rescane already revealed chunks. But you don't see this on map the same way as with newly discovered chunks (slow dimming).

@kovarex
Is it posible that multiple radars would be updating information about same chunk at same time. If it is this might result why updating chunks could be too slow even when using multiple radars.

[Animar]

Initialy i had the same idea as SilverWarrior But i Discovert a whole diverent Problem, after placing more then 20 radars their active zone are getting some flickering shadow spots. At 40 Radars their "active" zone is reduced to a few cunks while the remaning chunks covert with kinda fog of war ???

I mean they are still updating the inner area but i looks realy weird, flashing like that.

[SilverWarior]

@animar
Which version of Factorio are you using.
Map flickering as have been reported in thread below should already be fixed. I recomend you add a new post there and also provide your savegame for developers to further track the isue and fix it in future.
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =11&t=1689

[Animar]

I always use The latest version available. (8.6 right now)

thanks for the link you posted too the other thgread didn't noticed that one before. So i got this

I would like to make clear that in fact, this is not a bug but intended behavior.

To make sure the game runs smoothly enough, we limited the chart to update 2 chunks per tick (120 chunks per second).
These 2 chunks are chosen from all of the chart candidates by the time they were charted for the last time.
So when the area covered by radars gets to be too big, the engine can't update all in time.

and

I changed the timeout until the chunk starts to be dark from 1.4 seconds to 5 seconds (from the last update of the chunk on the map).
This removes all the flickering with some reserves.
The problem will still be there for much bigger factories, but there are other thing we might try to do in the future (way to avoid refreshing chunks that didn't change, some optimisations of the charting algorithm etc).

With that in mind i'm fine with it, because they still do their job just at the limit the engine can handle, i switch now to the other thread.

[malokin]

I always kind of liked the flickering, it always felt like an oldschool ww2 radar display.
It would be really neat if you could get the radar chunks to update in a spiral instead of a square, like you see radar screens in the movies do.

[ssilk]

Super idea, but spiral around what?

Perhaps the weighted center of all radar stations?

[FreeER]

Super idea, but spiral around what?
Perhaps the weighted center of all radar stations?

That would work for a main base, but what happens when you have several far away outposts with radars that don't cover the entire region inbetween? Use the weighted center AND calculate which chunks within need to be updated? Or use multiple 'centers' if there is a gap greater than, say, 20 between the coverages? Just curious It seems like a nice idea, though I've no idea how modern radars are implemented, though it does somewhat beg the question as to whether the enemy will be able to develop cloaking technology at some point...

[malokin]

I imagine it doesnt really matter how you make multiple radars array function, A. each radar with its own spiraling radar. B. the weighted center (good words, weighted center) of all the radars.
It would just be nice for new players to get the bling factor of that hollywood style radar. the devs might not like the idea of trying to program an aliased cirlce (i think thats what the call it) in a square grid. Changing the radius of the radars into the shape of a blocky circle would be cooler than the big square radar area.

EDIT: @FreeER, it would of course only apply if the radar areas are touching, radars that dont touch each other's affected areas would obviously not be able to coordinate with each other

[kovarex]

As I post here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =10#p14172
I plan to optimise the engine to avoid re-charting area that didn't change. I believe it to be sufficient for these kinds of saves.

[FrozenOne]

I still have a feeling that expansions that I didnt find personally by coming close don't exist. First the radar cant find them, and also enemy waves start coming from them only if i discover them, otherwise nobody spawns there. (also in previous game based on 0.7, there was no enemy wave at all during all time when rocket defense armed itself, any thoughts about that?)

[kovarex]

I still have a feeling that expansions that I didnt find personally by coming close don't exist. First the radar cant find them, and also enemy waves start coming from them only if i discover them, otherwise nobody spawns there. (also in previous game based on 0.7, there was no enemy wave at all during all time when rocket defense armed itself, any thoughts about that?)

We are aware of this.
The reason is, that the area isn't generated until you go there.
We have a plan for 0.9 (that will be very trivial to execute), that the area around player will be generated slowly over time the similar way as radar does, just without the charting, so the expansions and waves will come even when you don't explore.

[TGS]

I still have a feeling that expansions that I didnt find personally by coming close don't exist. First the radar cant find them, and also enemy waves start coming from them only if i discover them, otherwise nobody spawns there. (also in previous game based on 0.7, there was no enemy wave at all during all time when rocket defense armed itself, any thoughts about that?)

We are aware of this.
The reason is, that the area isn't generated until you go there.
We have a plan for 0.9 (that will be very trivial to execute), that the area around player will be generated slowly over time the similar way as radar does, just without the charting, so the expansions and waves will come even when you don't explore.

That sounds really good. But would it also be possible in the map settings to have a tickbox to turn off random 'spawning' of groups of creepers? I don't know if it is a bug, or an intentional feature. But I've noticed 'random' spawns on some saves that appear to come out of nowhere and start attacking. Even though there are no bases where they are spawning. (I know this because I've gone back to older saves and isolated exactly where they spawned... and even watched them spawned right in front of me with no base nearby).

It's really annoying. I mean I'm all for new biter nests spawning and THOSE creepers being pulled from the pollution... but it gets really annoying when biters magically spawn out of nowhere... fairly close to your factory or even inside it.

[ssilk]

In practice it means you need to build random lasers anywhere. I think how they do that is one mystery you need to find out as player.