Planning on getting a better game engine?

[Rathael]

You can't compare Factorio with OpenTTD as OpenTTD has much smaller sprites and thus require much less Video Memory.
And as far as I know OpenTTD also loads all of its sprites into Video Memory. Don't cofuse ability to chose between different sprite sheats with on demmand dynamic graphics loading.

Hmm I was under the impression that OpenTTD had a lot more sprites than Factorio or did you mean that they are using lower resolution sprites?

[AlexPhoenix]

Hmm I was under the impression that OpenTTD had a lot more sprites than Factorio or did you mean that they are using lower resolution sprites?

1)they have less sprites then factorio now
2)less frames in sprites
3)and yes, they have lower resolution.

[SilverWarior]

Hmm I was under the impression that OpenTTD had a lot more sprites than Factorio or did you mean that they are using lower resolution sprites?

As AlexPhoenix already pointed out their sprites have much lower resolution whic is actually understandable sine OpenTTD is just a remake of the original TTD which still ran in DOS and rquired 4 MB of RAM for storing both game data and game textures.
Open TTD requires any 8 bit VGA graphics card (these usualy have less than 1 MB of Video Memory if any) and 64 MB of ram for running game on Windows 95/98 or 32 MB of RAM when running game on linux.

It is true that usually the number of sprites present on screen is higher than in Factorio but that is only becouse they are much smaller. but when you fully zoom out in Factorio the number of sprites shown becomes same if not even grater but since Factorio sprites are larger it requires more processing power to render them.

[xng]

Factorio is very VRAM hungry. Yes this is a real and urgent problem. The thing is that all the "animations" in the game are frame-by-frame expanded in the VRAM (internally factorio is a 2D engine). When we take into account different animations for biters in all the directions and sizes, rotations for the train (that is one of the reasons why locomotive doesn't have any animation), all the player animations in all the directions, etc. MBs start to add up real fast. The vanilla is assured to fit into 512MB easily, but with mods that add a lot of content (especially biters) this starts to be a real problem.

I don't think this is an urgent problem per se, but something that can be optimized in the future closer to release and during the beta testing for a final product. Although, there are really just a few ways of accomplishing this:

* The first could be to make moving entities less "3D-looking" and by that being able to rotate them instead of having an atlas of animations for each directions, it would shave off 4/8 to 7/8 of video ram for those things, maybe even more for very few special variations of them.
* The second would be to make animations from several sprites instead of one animation per entity, making special effects that can be reused for many things. (It does lower performance because of fillrate though.). An example of this could be some electricity sprite animation that could be used for both labs and accumulators (and later even more stuff, like the occasional "random" bolt of electricity from the assemblers and so on...).
* The third and final that I can come up with right here and now would be to use the above together with the Particle Trimmer from Humus 3D, mainly used to save fillrate in particle systems (you know, transparent sprites, just like the ones factorio uses), and use it to make the sprites smaller in actual amount of pixels, it can be used for atlases too as long as each tile is the same size (which is true for Factorio).

Anyway, I really don't see this as an urgent problem right now, and one way to deal with it for now would be introducing a couple of simple special effects that can be added through the modding, and a way to make entities that autorotates, for those that want to make new aliens but don't want to try to draw 8 directions of each alien walking animation in photoshop (See the dog/pig-thread and you'll understand what I mean).

Maybe any of these things can at least give ideas. =)

I'm done here now. *promise*