Friday Facts #200 - Plans for 0.16

[Xterminator]

Definitely don't stop the Friday Facts unless you guys just have 0 inspiration to write them. Myself and I think many others really look forward to them each week!
It's part of what makes Factorio you guys as devs so special and awesome, is the connection and constant updates and communication about whats going on.

The terrain generation sounds amazing! The idea of hills/mountains and actual rivers, even if just visually, sounds absolutely fantastic. In fact, this is probably what I would personal want more than anything else mentioned in the to-do list for 0.16. Having some way of making the map seem less flat and more varied and such would add so much to the game I think.

Very much look forward to future FFF where it is discussed further.

[steinio]

twooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo hundred...

[hoosh]

The important part of this is that the spider was moved from backlog to 0.16 an actual release again. wahoo

[webkilla]

interesting things... interesting info

but

*deep breath*

0.15 stable when?

[Xiphoris]

I really enjoy reading all the Friday posts! They are way more interesting to us as players than you probably think. Remember that you live and breathe Factorio as your work, day-in and day-out. You've probably been talking about and working on the stuff that's in the posts a ton by the time that you write it, so it seems mundane to you. But as players, our primary life is something else, and we dip into the Factorio world now and then. Therefore all new information about Factorio is new to us, and not easily boring or stale. Factorio is such an amazing game that we wait with baited breath to see what you have in store. Information from within the dev team, and engagement from the team, is always highly prized.

Regarding map variability, for inspiration I'd recommend taking a glance at the mod called Alien Biomes. Examples:



I believe it largely recolors existing assets, but also adds a few new doodads and trees. However it works, it enhances the feeling of exploration. You ponder, "What's to the east?", and find that it's a massive mountain range covered with snow that makes a satisfying "crunch" as you trek across. Beyond that, you find an eerie alien forest dense with purple trees.

I suspect that you could further enhance the feeling of diverse terrain through clever use of ambient sound effects. You could add the sounds of ambient life when a player is in a forest, or the sound of blowing wind when in a desolate snow area or desert, etc.

I like using Alien Biomes because it makes each local map visually different from the others, but as I expand and reveal more terrain, it's obvious that all biomes are present in all maps. If you subjected it to the same "map preview" test, I think you'd also still find that it looks "uniformly random" from a high enough zoom level -- but I still think it adds value by reducing the chance that the player will personally notice it during gameplay within their revealed terrain.

Some variation like this in the base game would be appreciated. I would support incorporating Alien Biomes into vanilla. It also does some interesting things to smooth the visual transition between biome types.

Ultimately, though, I think it will be difficult to design a map that is "interesting" to explore unless you can provide some kind of set of resources, attractions, or structures that occur at low frequency -- a reason that "there" might be different from "here". Exploration will only be valuable if players can find something memorable. For example, consider Set Pieces in the game Don't Starve, which are rarely occurring premade structures, or the various small structures and buildings found in Minecraft. These structures can contain valuable resources that make them worth hunting for. The fact that they're rare and distinctive means that players remember finding them.

One thing to consider is that, in Factorio, there isn't a strong incentive to explore. By the time you've left the starting area, you already possess every resource that the game has to offer, namely coal, stone, iron, copper, oil, and water. There is no reason to explore beyond finding larger deposits. So I think there will be diminishing returns in investing in making the map interesting at larger scales.

To make the map interesting to explore, I think we'd need to consider adding some new content or structures, like rare biomes. Here are some ideas for rare biomes and structures:

• Perhaps evidence of previous human settlement that has been abandoned. (You know how in the Starcraft 2 single-player campaigns, there are miscellaneous civilian structures around the map? I'm imagining abandoned-looking buildings of a miscellaneous type like that.)
• Stone obelisks, or stonehenge, or other mysterious formations. Something to create the sensation that the planet is steeped in mysterious ancient secrets
• A biome with massive trees, where the trees are 2-3x their normal size
• A fossiziled stone biome where everything is gray. Any trees and plants occurring in this biome will use a stone texture and color. When you mine these trees, you receive stone ore.
• A biome filled with many impassable objects, like mountain ridges. Perhaps some of these can be mined, while others cannot. Initially, the player cannot mine and remove these objects, but can unlock the ability to clear them away with additional technology. This biome has unusually high resource density, but the presence of these objects (like a field of boulders or rock outcroppings) presents a challenge to the player's ability to harvest them.
• A volcano biome. The cone of the volcano is an impassable artwork tile, which is surrounded by black ash or faintly glowing lava. The doodad should be large enough that you can give the volcano a sense of depth, like it's popping up out of the ground. I'm imagining a doodad that's as wide as 2-3 assembler machines. The volcano glows faintly red and appears to pulse, especially at night. Perhaps resources are unusually rich near the volcano, creating an incentive to find them. (Or maybe volcanoes can offer an endgame resource called magma that the player can use for geothermal power; or perhaps the player can process magma into adamantium, a new endgame metal, etc. The volcano should ideally offer something special.)

[Avezo]

Check out 'perfect world' world generator plugin from Dwarf Fortress starter pack. It's AMAZING.

I would also like to share my story with my very first playthrough, it seems relevant. I think it was either late 0.13 or early 0.14. I started near big lake and as i were exploring the map, lake kept getting bigger and bigger, seemingly never ending, only after discovering really huge map area I found its end. There was tiny land connection over it to a huge desert (which was constantly under attack) and the rest of my base was grassland. To the north there seemed to be endless dense forests.

The point is - all different areas felt very distinctive, it made game and exploration so much more fun. In later patches something must've changed, because deserts, forests, grasslands and waters seemed much more mixed up, no huge chunks of either (I think there used to be 'terrain segmentation' option before that, which allowed to hage huge areas before). Can I have that back, please?

Oh, and of course - Introduce Z-axis for the entire game! That alone grants enormous boost to map generation!

[dasiro]

Since the map generation may start building oceans and isolated islands, can we look forward to marine logistics?

maybe in 2.1
they've thrown out a lot of new features out of the window in order to prepare for 1.0
from FFF 189:

We went through most of our Trello cards yesterday (And there are LOTS of them) and sorted this out, while the most asked question was: "Is this a new feature?", and the most frequent reaction to "Yes" was to delete the card. The only currently planned gameplay features are the artillery train and (probably) the spidertron.

so don't get your hopes up for anything new or a major change

[DOSorDIE]

200! Gratulation!

Please dont Stop it and i hope you will make it to 300 because my friday is only complete after i read you FFF.
It so intresting to see why sometime things need time, or why it take sometime longer as planned.
PS: Thas is because you dont want it good ... you want it perfect.

Spider and Arty Train are still in 0.16 Roadmap ... Juhu ... but when its take to much time make the Arty stationary ... it will awesome enough!

I have a little idea (maybe its worse or impossible to program) for the map generation.
Why not make only a little bit of the map (enough for the start) and render the rest in background (we all have Multicore CPU) step for step ...
Just an idea

Thank you soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much for my Nr. 1 game on this planet

[Daktush]

If you do end up implementing massive oceans think about implementing ships to go with them (And perhaps a deep sea monster or two)

[BHakluyt]

Hi Factorio Devs

Please keep going with the FFFs. Its the highlight of my week, the only light amidst a shitty job.

Regarding map gen, please make when setting resource frequency to very low that it spawns even less patches and further from each other for awesome railworld games. Currently vanilla mapgen spawns too much resource patches, it looks bad and is annoying and doesn't provide the proper challenge wanted. I gave up fiddling with RSO and lately even stopped playing at all. When freauency is at very low, you can make it even spawn a third less than current 15.30 vanilla.

Looking forward very much to the spider (tron.)

And please keep the FFFs coming. On days you post very late I even freak out and get onto google to check if some disaster happened over there in good old Czechoslovakia. Lol

[vsvasya]

It will be great to have different and large biomes. E.g. most oil in sand biome with his unique features: sand creatures, mining defense tactics, may be something like dust.
Somethink like "To advance in tech I need prepare yourself and explore and conquer new biome".

[AlastarFrost]

Regarding the map generation:
A noise generator will always create a pattern that, if zoomed out enough, is just not interesting.

I would suggest to use functions that provide some "emergent complexity". Cellular automatons for example have very simple rules, but create interesting patterns that are not as repetitive as noise. For example, there are one dimensional cellular automatons, that generate tree-like structures when the one dimensional lines (the generations) are assembled in the second dimension. This might be interesting for creating long river systems.

Two dimensional cellular automatons can restructure a base noise into clusters in just a few generations. The base "noise" tends to contract into certain structures (based on the rules) and most of the random noise just dissolves (because it dies off).

The advantage of using cellular automatons is, that the result is absolutely deterministic. This means that if you start with a random pattern from a noise generator (which is deterministic because you know the seed), the additional steps are also deterministic.

Another possiblity is looking into fractals. They have the advantage, that the map remains structured on every level of zoom. Although the self-similarity of fractals might be a problem. Without altering the parameters at certain distances, the maps look - well - like fractals.

[Frightning]

interesting things... interesting info

but

*deep breath*

0.15 stable when?

I second this, I thought in FFF#199 you guys implied that maybe stable 0.15 was incoming this weekend or so?

[impetus maximus]

i love Friday Facts. great to hear what you all are thinking/doing.
the techie details are always fascinating to me. keep the Friday Facts coming.

• Additional smoke related optimisations

would love to be able to enable smoke on my toaster graphics (HD 3000) without a FPS dip.
even if it's cartoony puff bitmaps i would be ok with that.

• Lamp related optimisations

i know what i'll be testing these on. Factorio - Sandstorm by DaveMcW
that and giant oscilloscopes.

world generation.
being a fan of huge train networks i'm excited about more varying world generation.

i'll have a royal with cheese, and a beer please.
cheers

[alingis]

I would recommend that you don't really need to reinvent the wheel on base building and exploration, but rather simply use what other games have done well already.

For example, Starcraft offers players starter bases with good resources, situated in a way that is easy to defend early. A second early expansion base requires simple exploration and a basic offensive force, but which is slightly more difficult to defend. Additional resource bases require more significant scouting, are situated closer to higher concentrations of enemy forces, in locations that are much more difficult to defend, require better supply lines, etc.

The main difference in approach is that there is far more intentionality in their correlation between resource bases, natural terrain defensibility, and enemy force placement.

Obviously there are plenty of differences between game styles, but there may be enough advantages in pacing to consider offering a more crafted experience.

[QGamer]

About the terrain generation, does that mean that someday in the future I'll spawn on a patch of land that's not green?

Does that not already happen? I remember back in 0.12 I would spawn in a desert sometimes. But for 0.16 yes definitely.

I did spawn in a desert...once. I'd like to see some more variability in the starting biome. Thanks for working on it.

One thing that would encourage exploration is to have the closest Uranium Ore generate just outside the starting area. Uranium Ore is completely useless (and unobtainable) in the beginning of the game, and by the time I have access to Sulfuric Acid I always have train technology. Furthermore, since Uranium Ore cannot be processed until the player has researched Nuclear Power, there is no need to have it at the beginning of the game. For new players, having Uranium Ore at the start of the game with no means to mine it out of the ground could result in a bit of confusion.

[ObliviNate]

First time posting here! Anyway, I think map generation matters a lot. Map generation shouldn’t be so uniform, but let’s not forget about resource and enemy distribution either. I think alien distribution in particular needs to be addressed.

It’d be really great if biomes affected gameplay more as well. For example, a biome that has fewer or no alien hives, like a desert.
A biome that has greater amounts of a type of resource, like oil.
A biome that makes aliens spawned on it stronger/faster.
A swamp, where you can’t place buildings unless you lay down stone or concrete, and will get vehicles stuck in.
A biome that makes solar power more/less efficient.

Also, I’d love to see more randomly generated structures. In the tutorial games, there were abandoned mining posts and things like that. It’d be really cool to come across an abandoned walled city or something.

[voxelv]

I like to read the FFF's whenever I remember. They're very fascinating and I think it's really cool to see how things go on in the background.

I've been thinking of learning myself some Lua to write a mod that adds the idea of "Underground".

You'd have to mine out the areas you want to use underground.
Areas where water is would be blocked off somehow.
You'd have to have special machines that have exhaust vents that go "up".
Stairs or elevators to go from above- to under- ground.
Underground belts would be available in the underground, somehow.
Perhaps large train tunnels, and boring machines.
Underground alien threats.
And then eventually you could tap the molten core of the world for power and iron production.
etc...

[Zaflis]

A longer-term solution will be to allow building noise functions from Lua code, which will have the side-effect of making the system hackable by modders.

I'm not sure how efficient Factorio's LUA interpreter is, but map generation is one of those things that need the most out of cpu performance. I can't imagine LUA being fast enough for that. However i would really hope every numeric parameter could be moddable, just maybe not the low level functions.

[Alice3173]

I always look forward to FFF. It feels like the start of the weekend after a busy week. Finally I can wind down, open a beer, read FFF and enjoy the weekend.

One of my favorite parts of the week is the next FFF releasing.

• Some hybrid, such as coherent noise-based terrain generation with stamps on it

This seems more or less like the best option. Though on top of that I'd suggest a wider variety of biomes (a snow/mountain biome at the least would be good) and looking into ore distribution and rarity differing across biomes as well. For example, my understanding of uranium mining irl is that it's most common in desert areas. So while it shouldn't be exclusive to deserts by any means it'd make sense to have it be much more rare outside desert biomes and reasonably common inside them.

I suspect that you could further enhance the feeling of diverse terrain through clever use of ambient sound effects. You could add the sounds of ambient life when a player is in a forest, or the sound of blowing wind when in a desolate snow area or desert, etc.

Some innocuous wildlife other than the biters would also help make things feel a bit better as well

Ultimately, though, I think it will be difficult to design a map that is "interesting" to explore unless you can provide some kind of set of resources, attractions, or structures that occur at low frequency -- a reason that "there" might be different from "here". Exploration will only be valuable if players can find something memorable. For example, consider Set Pieces in the game Don't Starve, which are rarely occurring premade structures, or the various small structures and buildings found in Minecraft. These structures can contain valuable resources that make them worth hunting for. The fact that they're rare and distinctive means that players remember finding them.

Having different resource distributions for each biome would help. Maybe introducing some uncommon ores for extra optional stuff that appear only in some of the more uncommon biomes would be a good idea as well. Or even alternative/mixed ores which when processed provide a different amount of a commonly obtainable ore or provides small amounts of multiple different ores.

• Perhaps evidence of previous human settlement that has been abandoned. (You know how in the Starcraft 2 single-player campaigns, there are miscellaneous civilian structures around the map? I'm imagining abandoned-looking buildings of a miscellaneous type like that.)
• Stone obelisks, or stonehenge, or other mysterious formations. Something to create the sensation that the planet is steeped in mysterious ancient secrets
• A biome with massive trees, where the trees are 2-3x their normal size
• A fossiziled stone biome where everything is gray. Any trees and plants occurring in this biome will use a stone texture and color. When you mine these trees, you receive stone ore.
• A biome filled with many impassable objects, like mountain ridges. Perhaps some of these can be mined, while others cannot. Initially, the player cannot mine and remove these objects, but can unlock the ability to clear them away with additional technology. This biome has unusually high resource density, but the presence of these objects (like a field of boulders or rock outcroppings) presents a challenge to the player's ability to harvest them.
• A volcano biome. The cone of the volcano is an impassable artwork tile, which is surrounded by black ash or faintly glowing lava. The doodad should be large enough that you can give the volcano a sense of depth, like it's popping up out of the ground. I'm imagining a doodad that's as wide as 2-3 assembler machines. The volcano glows faintly red and appears to pulse, especially at night. Perhaps resources are unusually rich near the volcano, creating an incentive to find them. (Or maybe volcanoes can offer an endgame resource called magma that the player can use for geothermal power; or perhaps the player can process magma into adamantium, a new endgame metal, etc. The volcano should ideally offer something special.)

Stuff like this would also be a good chance to provide alternative sources for some resources as well. Mysterious formations and such could possibly be studied or analyzed and provide a diminishing supply of certain science packs for example. A derelict settlement or outpost could provide ammo, armor that could potentially be better than what the player possesses but has low durability left, weapons, maybe even the occasional defense turret or something. Or even factories where the previous tenant didn't win against the bugs in the end but the remnants that the bugs didn't destroy can be mined up and relocated or simply repowered to provide the player a partial outpost or something.