Friday facts #153 - 0.13 Stable, 0.14 Experimental

[wwdragon]

AGH!

I just noticed that drag-assemble tracks are gone from .14.

WTF?!?

[kovarex]

AGH!

I just noticed that drag-assemble tracks are gone from .14.

WTF?!?

What?

[Masterfox]

To be honest, I would prefer it if you made the dragging tracks optional and allowed us to craft curved rail as an alternative.

[kinnom]

there is a mod that adds the curved rail back as an item

[Kuro-Maii]

My first reaction to the grids was to stop reading and update the game...
only to be disappointed that it is a thing a mod can enable.....

this needs to be part of vanilla, if you aks me..

as for the roboport in a locomotive... it would not have crossed my mind to put on in there as there is no inventory to work with any way.

also the locomotive is the part that most often meets with other things, e.g. biters, players, cars, other trains, players.
so I would rater put shields and lasers in the locomotive over a roboport so it can 'clear' the track with out tanking as much damage.
then have the couple of wagons with a spilt of [roboports and shields] or [lasers and shields] to build what I blueprint down and keep the defence high on the rest of the train.

so please make it a "no mods required" part of vanilla, I want to make my own FARL idea with these equipment slots now thanks to this FFF

[sandonoval]

AI modules that you can insert in the vehicles so they can self-operate/function like the robot army mod

[mknejp]

Suggestion: when you have the car's equipment tab open please make shift-clicking items in your inventory go to equipment instead of the trunk. That'd be really great.

[ShawnShepard]

This game just keep getting better and better and more and more interesting.

Keep up the great work development team.

Your Straight-ish Love,

ShawnShepard

[Earendel]

AI modules that you can insert in the vehicles so they can self-operate/function like the robot army mod

+1
I was going to suggest the same thing.

On a related note, it would be very useful for mod makers if there was more basic version of the Unit entity where there is no default behavior and you can control it's movement, and attack behavior directly with scripts.

Also it would be nice to run pathfinding calls directly on the worldspace/layer to return a path for various uses (like building roads, assigning the same path to units in succession, etc).

It seems like currently all the automated land unit mods are stuck using with re-skinned biters.

[British_Petroleum]

A vehicle with no wheels, guns, or engine, or anything, just a shell. Then you could add things to it by placing them in the grid; wheels or tracks, armour, rockets, ammo, lasers, batteries, power source, engine, AI computer for autonomous or remote control. Could even add wings, jet engines, or propellers to make it a flying vehicle. You could have completely customized vehicles !

[hitzu]

A vehicle with no wheels, guns, or engine, or anything, just a shell. Then you could add things to it by placing them in the grid; wheels or tracks, armour, rockets, ammo, lasers, batteries, power source, engine, AI computer for autonomous or remote control. Could even add wings, jet engines, or propellers to make it a flying vehicle. You could have completely customized vehicles !

This could be hard on a graphical side.

[Proxy]

A vehicle with no wheels, guns, or engine, or anything, just a shell. Then you could add things to it by placing them in the grid; wheels or tracks, armour, rockets, ammo, lasers, batteries, power source, engine, AI computer for autonomous or remote control. Could even add wings, jet engines, or propellers to make it a flying vehicle. You could have completely customized vehicles !

This could be hard on a graphical side.

it could use a System Simallar to AOBD from Minecraft.
basically uses one Texture and Recolors it to match whatever Item it has to be.
should work with Models too

[Deadly-Bagel]

Something I'd like to query, you guys say things like "we'd like to hear your ideas" (speaking about new modules for vehicles) but how?

Posting it here seems a bit pointless since ideas would be drowned admist the general comments, so do we create topics in Suggestions? Should we create one topic in Suggestions and just post discussions to it (tidier but would be subject to nearly the same problems posting here).

[Loewchen]

Something I'd like to query, you guys say things like "we'd like to hear your ideas" (speaking about new modules for vehicles) but how?

Posting it here seems a bit pointless since ideas would be drowned admist the general comments, so do we create topics in Suggestions? Should we create one topic in Suggestions and just post discussions to it (tidier but would be subject to nearly the same problems posting here).

I see the same issue as well, there are so many Ideas and suggestions that I doubt the devs could read all of them, and while ssilk is giving it structure, it is still on the devs to boil it down to the 1‰ that are realistic. At least to me it seems that even the best suggestion is likely to never be found. All of that might be just an issue of missing feedback though. Maybe someone has a suggestion on how to improve the system...errr damit

[Klonan]

Something I'd like to query, you guys say things like "we'd like to hear your ideas" (speaking about new modules for vehicles) but how?

Posting it here seems a bit pointless since ideas would be drowned admist the general comments, so do we create topics in Suggestions? Should we create one topic in Suggestions and just post discussions to it (tidier but would be subject to nearly the same problems posting here).

We read through all the comments on friday fact topics, and also i keep a close eye on the ideas and suggestions board,
So don't worry, if you post somewhere i will see it

[Xterminator]

Something I'd like to query, you guys say things like "we'd like to hear your ideas" (speaking about new modules for vehicles) but how?

Posting it here seems a bit pointless since ideas would be drowned admist the general comments, so do we create topics in Suggestions? Should we create one topic in Suggestions and just post discussions to it (tidier but would be subject to nearly the same problems posting here).

We read through all the comments on friday fact topics, and also i keep a close eye on the ideas and suggestions board,
So don't worry, if you post somewhere i will see it

Nothing escapes the gaze of Klonan!

[Deadly-Bagel]

Wow, you guys sure are dedicated. I was part of the Planetary Annihilation pre-release and they didn't really want to know. Had pretty much every user saying the interface is really laggy and generally sucky and AFAIK it never got fixed, unless it was just before release. For you guys as well as the game itself I hope Factorio has a shining future ahead of it ^_^

Personally I think the best thing you could do for a vehicle module is get a Roboport module working and optimised. This would give players the option of having "construction vehicles" that are basically just power and a ton of roboports.

Late game, one of my biggest grievances is building outposts. First I need to build a rail there so I pack 500+ rails, 200 lights, 100 signals, 50 chain signals, 10 train stops and 50 large power poles. Then the outpost itself, 300 miners (depending on map settings), 400 belts, 24 steel chests, arithmetic combinator + green and red wires (for loading chest balancing), 500 walls, 100 laser turrets, 100 medium power poles, 5 roboports, 10 construction robots and 100 repair packs. That's over 40 stacks of stuff in addition to your usual stash of various inserters, splitters and underground belts, assembling machines, pipes, etc, that you keep on your person at all times, and I nearly always end up going back because either I forgot something or the 200 miners I could fit in my inventory didn't quite cover it.

To make things worse, more often than not there'll be a ton of trees around where you want to build, so you get your bots to clear them and almost immediately your inventory is maxxed out.

I'm hoping I'll be able to have a car or tank automatically loaded with all the above. When I need a new outpost, I hop in the designated vehicle, drive it to the site and drop down my blueprints. Drive the car back (or mine it and take the train), drop it back in the loading bay ready for the next outpost. This creates incentive for multiple vehicles, each needing their own modules and loading setup. To assist with this it would be nice if something like certain belt setups can correct a vehicle's direction and move it into a loading bay.

Aside from that I would quite like an invisibility module as mentioned, not for combat but just to keep the car relevant as a fast and light vehicle. When you hit endgame you're pretty much forced to use the tank which is a LOT slower. Something like if you fire a weapon or collide with something it takes 10 seconds to recloak, and has a large power drain.

Nanite repair module? Slowly repairs the vehicle internally without needing a construction bot to be deployed (as it would immediately die in an attack).

A BIG help would be something to deal with trees and maybe rocks. Instead of colliding with it, the tree is either destroyed or collected (maybe this is an option?) and slows down the vehicle (more modules = less slow), invisibility is undisrupted. This is more for ease of travel than clearing trees. Alternatively, a new vehicle like a hover car that ignores unit collision (would be absurdly useful with a roboport to build an outpost since you don't have to worry so much about coverage).

Lastly there has GOT to be a better way of building rails... What I came up with was rather complex but similar to the FARL, and maybe you guys have ideas on this already. Not necessary for vanilla really but it feels like a bit of a stumble in the flow of the game when I have to spend fifteen minutes laying rails to build every outpost.

[Mengmoshu]

Have you done any rail building from 0.13 onward? It seems pretty good to me, and integrates nicely with construction robots. And if you're talking about building outposts from vehicles then you should be using blueprints for at least some of it.

If you're using a mod that enables the equipment grids on vehicles you can already put a roboport and power supply on a vehicle with inventory and give it some construction bots and it'll work. There isn't really a need to actually develop a roboport specifically for cars. You'll need to make sure the vehicles inventory contains the stuff from the blueprint, because like player roboports the bots won't take from a logistics network.

With how close we seem to be to 1.0 I'd much rather see the devs working on newer stuff like your invisibility idea.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Oh, derp, I misread, only the locomotive currently can't use the roboport since it has no inventory of its own. I still think it could use some tweaking as it would be better if it had longer range, either by scaling up better or by equipping more roboports. Vehicles are less manoeuvrable so you want to be able to just park it and have it cover the whole outpost, or most of it. Oooh, could even leave it there in place of an actual roboport, when the deposit is exhausted you just deconstruct everything and move elsewhere. Lots of possibilities.

And yeah manual rail building is easier, but building a two-way rail system with power, lights and signals isn't quite that simple. For long distances blueprints are a must but right now it's fastest on foot, and you're not even moving the whole time as you need to wait for your robots to catch up.

I'm not saying something -needs- to be done about it, but it would be an immense quality of life improvement to have something faster for the endgame.

[Mengmoshu]

Yeah, late game rail building can be pretty time consuming. As someone who generally only plays one vanilla game per major version I've usually got FARL. So really what I'd like to see is FARL in the vanilla game, though the devs are likely to put their own spin on things like they did with the auto trash slots.

The equipment grids on wagons and engines (at least with the mod I'm using to enable them) are a pretty good size so multiple Personal Roboports fit just fine. That said, Personal Roboport ranges are a little short to cover things like Ore patches from a loading station, or a particularly big military outpost, so I'd request that some kind of mk2 and mk3 Personal Roboports be added. The nice thing about higher marks is that all they should need from the devs is a little balancing work and maybe art, since they won't need any new engine code.