Friday Facts #172 - Blending and Rendering

[Deadly-Bagel]

While we are on the topic of addressing rail signals is there any chance of them becoming colourblind friendly? Or at least higher contrast? Currently the colours I see them are green, blue and almost black (yellow and green are identical). It's not too much of an issue for me as I have pretty straightforward rails and have perfected my intersections however just this weekend I failed to notice a deadlock on an unloading station I'd built because I'd tacked on a stone unloading station and hadn't signalled it properly. Was only when I had no iron that I checked and found the trains queued up.

[joseph222]

Sometimes we will just need to be patient for them to make a good game.

so dont stress them

[MrGrim]

Be careful, it's like with kerning. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

That's slightly and deliciously evil to all of the people googling "kerning" right now.

Honestly people could do with some training on color. Think how many people you know that can go from camera/scanner to monitor to printer and maintain accurate color reproduction the entire chain. Add to that training on identifying lossy audio and video compression artifacts, and people would simply stop tolerating things like Twitch's horrendous quality and demand their digital video and music subscriptions/purchases weren't such poor quality. I mean Netflix is convenient.. but holy banding, batman!

So go forth, and ruin all of the things so that we can demand better!

[Exasperation]

Be careful, it's like with kerning. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

That's slightly and deliciously evil to all of the people googling "kerning" right now.

Honestly people could do with some training on color. Think how many people you know that can go from camera/scanner to monitor to printer and maintain accurate color reproduction the entire chain. Add to that training on identifying lossy audio and video compression artifacts, and people would simply stop tolerating things like Twitch's horrendous quality and demand their digital video and music subscriptions/purchases weren't such poor quality. I mean Netflix is convenient.. but holy banding, batman!

So go forth, and ruin all of the things so that we can demand better!

I saw the following on twitter the other day, and it seems relevant:

side effects of excessive kerning include:
dizzmess
insomma
diamhea

[Alastor]

Are you planning on fixing the shadows at all?

The planet is on a star synchronous orbit and what we consider nights are actually eclipses from the inner planets. See fixed

Ohhhhh !!! Does that mean we'll get to play on the dark side of the planet in the next version ?!?
If it's permanently dark it must be barren and frozen !!! You would have to create your own light to grow plants and such. Also you would have variable "moonlight" due to all those other planets consistantly passing by around you and reflecting the sun !

Do we also get to play with the constant planets collisions that are bound to happen in such a crowded solar system ?

[Anson]

Are you planning on fixing the shadows at all?
1. ... 2. ... 3. ...

i can live with these three effects since they are only small optical glitches,
or maybe caused by a moon or whatever, but a fourth effect is more serious to me:

4. shadows darken lamps themselves, and warning lights, train signals, etc

4. when a shadow from a tree or other object is cast on top of a lit lamp, the lamp may still produce light for the surroundings, but the lamp itself becomes so dark that it is barely visible in the shadow and in comparison to neighboring lamps. the same also (or even more) applies to colored warning lamps, train signals along a track through a forest, etc. and even the shadow of wires extinguishes part of lit lamps.

currently, to use and also clearly see color indicators, warning lamps, train signals, etc, i have to remove all shadows, cutting down trees next to them first, and sometimes also move power poles or other large/high buildings, especially annoying when a big substation powers lamps around it and some of them are quite dark because of the substation's shadow.

shadows.PNG (64.21 KiB) Viewed 3317 times

[Dave64738]

Well, I'll just drop this here...

Factorio interesting shadows.png (459.83 KiB) Viewed 3137 times

If it's only my OCD that's bothered by that then it can probably be ignored.
I think there'd be a better way of improving it than via a massive resource drain (like calculating light levels periodically, then picking from one of maybe 8 or 16 predefined shadow sprites (think compass directions) accordingly). Attempting 3D ray traced realtime shadows would of course impact performance horribly.