Friday Facts #199 - The story of tile transitions

[Rhamphoryncus]

Another option is to change the tile graphics to be centered on the intersection between a 2x2 area of tiles.

As demonstrated in this article: http://blog.project-retrograde.com/2013 ... g-squares/

A single strip of land or water can be exactly one tile wide this way.

This solves your issue and also cuts down on the number of necessary transitions, allowing more room in texture memory for variations.

It's interesting but this actually involves the "tile correction logic" option. A single tile should allow 4 different types but they only have graphics for 2, forcing them to alter surrounding tiles if you create such a situation.

You can't even be that strict with factorio. Intersection between 2 biomes and water means a minimum of 3 types in a tile. It might be salvageable if using 2-3 layers though.

[Engimage]

Waiting for 0.16 like there is no tomorrow
As for tile transitions I think if you would just shift shore transition to the edge of the ground tile with only couple of water pixels left there it would be much more convenient. And most entities placed on such edge would not look that rediculous. In this case two ground tiles put diagonally from one another would be drawn as two small islands as opposed to two connected islands so player would not be confused being unable to travel between them.

However if you put it on the water tile you have an option to make it animated with surf waves (if you ever think of animated ground tiles). Until then I think leaving transition on ground tile is more convenient.

[Projekt_13]

Maybe, the game could finde such "small flow" tiles and make them passable for players and biters, but makes sure you can't build on them?
That way, we can keep this nice things, without makeing them a issue for wandering players, but still a issue enogth that you have to think about when building there.

That or the playercharacter is hydrophobic.

And a bit of (optional) animation would be nice, tripple the watertileset and put a checkbox in the graphic-option would be enogth, right?

[Supercheese]

It was also considered, but the shore shape would have much more lower level detail then.

Good point... might look a little... edgy.

[webkilla]

Good that the water edge thing is getting fixed - I've been hoping to see that for a while

but I am sad to see the release of U15 be pushed another week

[Rocksen]

someone suggested 2x2 grid, but instead of ALL tiles, you only do water generation on a 2x2. i would have to assume water generation takes place last right? if not you could do a pass over for just water. doing a 2x2 grid over the top of the 1x1 grid wouldn't be that bad, and it would solve you getting tiny edges in generation. placing titles in water, e.g dirt would result in a 2x2 placement instead of a 1x1 placement. this would mean that you could have huge overhead edges to keep the look of the edge of ground holding the water, but also keep the water/land tiles from mixing in really weird ways. this also allows for FINER looking rivers/lakes because if you spent enough time on the generation and a few new sprites you could create very round looking patterns. this however would take quite a lot of work, maybe not worth spending that much time on =)

[eX_ploit]

Also don't forget to test how it looks if offshore pumps are inserted into that thin water shore.

[TheVeteraNoob]

Instead of the 2 x 2 grids as suggested. How about .5 x .5 grids for water. I'm not too familiar with how the water generation techniques work. But you would then only need to make textures for, the water tiles, corners, and edges.

[Ripshaft]

Weird I had never run into that particular problem with the water transition, but I certainly sympathize with the difficulty in addressing something like that lol

I was looking over it and thought - yeah that seems like a pretty straight forward fix I don't see what's problematic abou..... ohhhhhhhh...

I'm not too sure on what your options are, but I expect you'll find a happy solution after enough putting face to keyboard =p

[golfmiketango]

but in next version, we would need to have graphics like this:

I fail to see the problem with this, visually. It's not clear to me, when FFF talks about ways to fix the "problem" what problem is meant. Perhaps you're referring to a potential permutational explosion of possible tile-transitions baked into water tiles since suddenly multiple terrain-types can have "off-ramps" into the same water tile?

I guess the obvious trick would be to try to maintain a "fault line," which has uniform color/shading/etc, in precisely the same place, across all the terrain-transition tile geometries supported. Then you could just mix-and-match along the fault-lines and tidy up any direct terrain-terrain transitions using the usual process (whatever that may be, not claiming to know... no doubt something painstaking and hard, but, in this case, you already have the corresponding on-land transition art to borrow from).

I presume you already have a tile-transition test world but it would probably need to be expanded. Maybe I'm missing the point entirely, who knows.

One thing is for sure, regardless of my vast ignorance of how everything actually works: The relationship proposed, between shoreline and "off-limits" tiles for building, makes a hell of a lot more sense to a regular human than how it works now. Only after literally like a year of addiction to factorio was I finally able to visually inspect a map and say, "I can build here" without trying it, given the status-quo. Even still sometimes I'm not 100% sure.

[DaveMcW]

Now 9-tile island spawns will look 400% bigger!

[Optera]

Current land-water transition can only get better.
I've been using Water Fix for a while now. Blending seamless into any (modded) biome and building concrete right next to water are features I'd love to see in the base game.


Small rivers like this would add some flair. Players, (some) vehicles and biters should be able to cross them though.

[torham]

I guess the obvious trick would be to try to maintain a "fault line," which has uniform color/shading/etc, in precisely the same place, across all the terrain-transition tile geometries supported.

How about making all water edges from sand? Sandy Shores would be acceptable, I think

[hitzu]

I guess the obvious trick would be to try to maintain a "fault line," which has uniform color/shading/etc, in precisely the same place, across all the terrain-transition tile geometries supported.

How about making all water edges from sand? Sandy Shores would be acceptable, I think

Then you have to made all the same transitions between sand and grass.

[Mimos]

However you decide to handle the shoreline tiles I would be happy if walkable tiles are always buildable. Otherwise "connecting" walls to water will no longer work. I prefer the current version where it is clearly visible that the wall will let noone pass at the edge of the water.

[Eketek]

I was going to recommend an overly complicated scheme that comes with lots of somewhat irrelevant features and potential for variety and efficiency (shader-based texture blending with various procedural generation options), but ended up concluding that I'd really just be recommending "layers". So I'd obviously recommend "layers" as likely to be the preferable compromise.

[Avezo]

This actually looks cool imo, not sure about other shapes, but I would rather see you keep these and add river generating algorithms to the game (and some simple wooden bridges or something). Maybe allow biters to jump over small 1-tile width obstacles?

[Junion]

I honestly like the small water tile look..to a degree.

how about coding it to look more like a river when it's that small? Or a stream..or something similar to that? Basically special "1 tile wide" water spots...but it is just a graphical look/change?

[Jap2.0]

It was also considered, but the shore shape would have much more lower level detail then.

Good point... might look a little... edgy.

I'd like to add a pun, but I think mine are on the shoreline of being dank.

[featherwinglove]

Oh, but I so think that both and would be so much fun. Probably not worth it though as we'd need a coast tile.

As some people requested it, we made subtitles of the second part of the interview with me. It is more focused on the technical part of Factorio which might not be entertaining for so many people, but some might still find it interesting.

Sees word "technical"; can't resist. Too busy staring at the beautiful train roundabouts in the background to read the subti- ...wait, did he say "Allegro"? That's still a thing? Then did Kovarex forget that https://www.factorio.com/buy is still a thing? (Good thing, 'cus I

many, many expletives

hate Steam.)