Friday Facts #194 - Automated combinator pipeline

[mward]

Re the 7x7 symbols: us ancient ones can remember when 8x8 bitmap fonts were considered "high resolution". The 8x8 grid needed to include spaces between the characters, and descender (letters like j, p and j that extend below the baseline). So of course a 7x7 grid is enough for any symbols when you don't need to include descenders or interword spaces

My first computer was a Compukit UK101 which had 16 lines of 48 characters where each character was an 8x8 grid of pixels. It had up to 8K of RAM (thats kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes!) plus 1K of graphics RAM.

I wrote a procedurally generated, open world, RTS (real time strategy) game with destructable environments which can now be played on any computer with Java installed, thanks to Tim Burton's UK101 emulator.

Download the game here: http://uk101.sourceforge.net/docs/samples.html#rtstrek
Other UK101 software is here: http://www.gkc.org.uk/martin/software/index.html#UK101

[V453000]

Why are you rendering shadows separately? It is possible to render only one sprite sheet with shadows. And if you have right scale, you can get coordinates of wires with blender too.

The shadows in the game are actually separate layers for most entities... Apart from that, I don't think it's feasible to do with cycles, do you have some example? With Blender Render I know it's possible for sure. Coordinates for wires, you can probably get them with some blender python scripting, I'm sure about that. But putting it to the game would still require similar scripting and being able to do it on the final sprite gives you much better control I feel like.

For example this file: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=40559#p240135

And and it's possible just from box from 2.78c: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiU46VHzEnY

I took a look at your pump file, that's almost exactly the same how we do it as well. The compositor nodes are a little bit different, but the main difference is that we just save the files separately because the game engine takes them separately to merge them later in the shadow layer.

I've read about the new shadow catcher but didn't see it in action yet, it's interesting to say the least.

Thank you for your hints!

[someuid]

I just finished reading this FFF and thought the following 3 things:

1. Man, this is like way out of my league in regards to computers. I do a lot of sysadmin stuff and I've done some programming, but I had NO IDEA how much went into graphics. How did he/she learn all this stuff? Surely this isn't just "Oh I learned this over a few weekends goofing around with Blender and Photoshop."

2. You know, I've never taken the time at work to automate some tasks because I know the boss will flip when he learned I spent two days figuring out how to automate it rather than the 10 minutes to do it manually. But after reading this, SCREW THE BOSS. Monday I automate something.

3. This is probably hands-down the best argument against software piracy. This shows you that a game or program isn't just some pile of bits that took a few minutes to download. It's a lot of hard work in areas you don't understand anything about and could not reproduce if you tried.

[bobingabout]

That was a waste of a perfectly good explanation.

Atlantis Season 1 episode 1, in response to Dr Meredith Rodney McKay's brief explanation of what a ZPM is.


On a more serious note. I still think the entire combinatory system needs an overhaul. in theory, Processing units are quite complete pieces of electronic circuitry, plus you have automated flying robots that likely contain some sort of GPS guidance system, yet it takes a whole building to do a simple logistics comparison.

instead of having to connect a large array of combinators together to create quite a simple logic solution, you should instead have some sort of programmatic array inside a single entity. In fact, before I actually read the description, that's what I assumed this was https://us1.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... -nodes.png
My train of thought was along the lines of "Wow, that's a huge improvement to the way combinators work", then I found out there is no functionality change at all, and what I was looking at was just your graphics script.

[Xenomorph]

...how long it will take if somebody make an video with a combinator controlled light-display to show a video of mario paint playing a song with the sound from miditorio

[Xenomorph]

That was a waste of a perfectly good explanation.

Atlantis Season 1 episode 1, in response to Dr Meredith Rodney McKay's brief explanation of what a ZPM is.

Indeed

[brunzenstein]

Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo could help you a lot.
Available for PC, Mac and iOs
https://youtu.be/ChLfAPq5bVU

[gallomimia]

Really very interesting! Bravo graphics dude(ette)s! Especially like the automation take, and the pipeline graphics using factorio graphics