Friday Facts #201 - 0.15 Stable, but not really

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-201

[Silden]

Maybe the time is right to review the whole blueprints system, I don't like that it creates items to hold in inventory to make it work.

[DDDGamer]

This Friday Facts should be titled "Moar Faster" :p
Glad to hear that mega factory maps are not alienated (pun intended), those are a great logistical challenge
Excited about the optimizations, great work as always!

[Cabanur]

I don't like the rail segment color lines. When I read about this plan on a recent FFF, I thought you'd re-purpose the '>>>' arrows you already had in place for showing rail direction with signaling and color it depending on the hovered rail segment.

This implementation seemed so obvious to me and so user intuitive that I just asumed you already had a similar idea.

This simple line you now draw over the rails works as a debug option and I'm sure hardcore factorio players and fans won't mind it at all. But it's just an ugly line drawn over an otherwise beautiful game.

[orzelek]

Is there a chance to actually release all the optimizations before you work on big point stuff like UxD or map generation?
Smaller release with only optimizations would be useful - especially that they seem to be ready

[ske]

Does the rail block visualisation work with rail tunnels?

[Durabys]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-201

I see that Xterminator and the Mad Science Campaign crew complained a lot..

Also, will we see some steam optimization with classical boilers/steam engine and heat exchangers/steam turbines? Because above 8+ reactors it starts to exponentially lag the UPS so much that I am considering tearing my nuke plant down and make massive solar farms instead. Weren't map spanning solar farms EXACTLY the thing you wanted to prevent us from having to do when you introduced nuclear?! Please optimize steam. It sucks.

Or make a roundabout solution: a Mk.2 reactor that needs space science to research, is very expensive and directly converts nuclear fission fuel to electricity, no heat exchangers or water pipes slowing down ups necessary. Such a solution would be easiest to do from a programming perspective because I do not think steam can be made more UPS friendly.

[posila]

Also, will we see some steam optimization with classical boilers/steam engine and heat exchangers/steam turbines? Because above 8+ reactors it starts to exponentially lag the UPS so much that I am considering tearing my nuke plant down and make massive solar farms instead. Weren't map spanning solar farms EXACTLY the thing you wanted to prevent us from having to do when you introduced nuclear?! Please optimize steam. It sucks.

Or make a roundabout solution: a Mk.2 reactor that needs space science to research, is very expensive and directly converts nuclear fission fuel to electricity, no heat exchangers or water pipes slowing down ups necessary. Such a solution would be easiest to do from a programming perspective because I do not think steam can be made more UPS friendly.

Please share your save in viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17501

[brunzenstein]

0.16 is due when?

[pleegwat]

Some thoughts on save performance.

Firstly, you mentioned a few weeks ago that you were looking into optimizing data structures for item stacks to make certain frequent operations faster. Similar updates may benefit save performance as it needs to go through a lot of data structures.
Secondly, you mention multithreading the generation of initial map chunks. Both loading and saving may benefit a lot from the same optimization.

[Trepidati0n]

I think the game right now in terms of launching a single rocket is "spot on" with any of the presets. Nothing about the the baseline is clunky. However, you did add "infinite research" drives "bigger and bigger bases" without adding in features to make "bigger and bigger bases" possible. I can see why you didn't (few % of players do this scale).

For example, it takes around 5-6GW er 1kSPM (full productivity). I removed the reactors system from my base and replaced it with a cheaty source and got back 2 ms of my 14.3 ms usage. That seems odds to me 14% of my CPU time is for the power plant. I really do understand the desire for how fluid/heatpipes work but I do not think a) it is in anyway obvious to the player how they limit out and b) use a large amount of processing resources.

This thread alone (viewtopic.php?t=19851) make me feel that this problem is made to complicated for the vast majority of players. Why not just make it simple...sum up the total pipe segments for a line and say "I can move X fluid per second and the pipe can hold Y units of fluid". This would then reduce the computation significantly (since all pipes connected together in that group would be done once). Same for heat pipes. Treat them as simple resistor regardless of series/parallel combination. Thus if you have 10 vs 20 your can move 2x vs 1x power and put this on a tool tip.

My argument from a gameplay view though might be more simple of "Is this so overly complicated that a users first reaction to it is go read the wiki"?

[rorror]

More optimalisations for version 0.16! Tnx can't wait.
Is there already a list (unoffical) for 0.16 changes, like there was on reddit before 0.15 launched?

[snafets]

The signal visualization looks great. Something I would find very helpful is the direction and maybe mark the corresponding signals (this signal controls this block). Also dose it work for noobs like me that use two-way tracks

[Zool]

When the blueprint/book, is big and is being transferred while the player is already holding it, it can't be moved to inventory/quickbar,

You could solve this type of problems by simply disabling the blueprint button until the loading of blueprints is completed.

[alexzzzz]

There's always something else that can be optimized. Last week we purchased some new hardware because I wanted to test if 'throwing money at it' was a viable method of improving compilation times (and the speed at which we can develop/fix things). We purchased a brand new i9-7900X CPU and compatible hardware with great results. After some difficulties getting everything setup it was almost 150% faster than the previous setup I was using.

My imagination understands it as the compilation now takes 150% less time than before => it takes negative amount of time => the compilation goes backwords in time => the compiler compiles the source code from the future.

Could you throw a bit more money into this and compile the stable 0.16 right away?

[Gandalf]

the 'new hotness' of 0.16.

Release it already! Hype!!

[maniak1349]

How about notifications some ~5 seconds before autosave? However fast saving process will be, it will still cause distractions and notifications will help player a lot to deal with it.

[Odhrean]

Is there a chance to actually release all the optimizations before you work on big point stuff like UxD or map generation?
Smaller release with only optimizations would be useful - especially that they seem to be ready

You introduce bugs when you make changes. Fixing these bugs takes time and concentration from the current work.
So I think this will not happen. They will use the new features in development, fine tune them more, find/fix some bugs and release when the rest is done. You can sleep well knowing that the player don't find (that much) bugs at a stable release.

[huhn]

bad example i found the missing signal instantly.

none the less very very nice feature.

[eX_ploit]

On this new computer with normal graphics quality Factorio takes 9.84 seconds to reach the main menu. I think that's pretty good for a game these days

Actually it's not good. Seems like you are loading all of the assets before showing main menu, while only a small minority of those assets are needed in main menu. You can just load those assets and then load everything else in background while player chooses what he's gonna play.