Friday Facts #217 - Just another Friday Facts

[vedrit]

What are the controls like on the tank? Can the driver control the wheels while the passenger controls the cannon? That would be super cool!

There will be a toggle that can switch who controls the weapons(driver or passenger). So the driver can drive while the passenger can shoot.

Can we get additional information, such as

Will trains have passenger seats? Will modders be able to specify number of passenger seats? How are different vehicle functions/guns allocated? What does this mean for network syncing?

[Engimage]

Making sure the starting area is not covered by trees.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a scenario included crash landing and a debris field, the explosions and resulting fires would make a nice clear area in which to start building, while adding some initial excitement.

Hmm, let me try that out

I like the idea very much but I want to discourage from creating live fires on game start as this will generate a hell of a ton of pollution and will attract biters before the player is actually ready to meet them.

However maybe its even a nice idea to meet some biters from the start to have a feeling that you actually landed on a hoslite planet... But pistol is a bit too harsh on the player

Regarding resource balance. I really like that you want to address resource generation. And I am even more excited about you being ready to look into recipes.
I would like to point out several things that would help with this:

• Steel requiring 5 Iron Plates is too much making steel smelting area an enormous monstrocity for generally no game value. Also 5 is a bad value so making it at least 4 would be a good thing.
• Copper wires requirement for expensive mode Green Circuits is also too much and 10 is also a bad value. Make it 8 to make design much more beautiful. Also 5 is generally a much worse value than 4. You could also look into shifting the price into making wires consume 2 copper per cycle instead of 1, and lower requirement of copper wires on green circuits to a more reasonable value like 4.

And ofcourse the resource generator code is always welcome to be looked at. RSO mod is so popular for a reason.

[xng]

In the ratio statistics only the science is considered, if you consider all the infrastructure you need to build (or that people build on average) to complete the game I bet the needed iron ratio will be a lot higher, as most infrastructure are belts, ammo, rail, trains, assemblers and inserters.

[mrvn]

Nice.

Counter-suggestion: remove the resource "pecking order" entirely and just assign each resource patch a random weight. What patch swallows up other patch would depend on their relative weights and distance from the patch center tile. This will result in greater variability (iron won't always override copper or vice versa) and more natural borders between overlapping patches.

That would still cause one ore to overlap the other, clearly visual by the shape of the patches. Since the amount of ore seems to tapper of towards the sides why not let the ore with more resources stay on each tile? That way the border between overlapping ore patches would be the line of equal amounts of ores instead of one type simply erasing the other.


And here is an idea for balancing. Why not keep track of the ore placed so far and factor in the ore consumed so far. Then dynamically adjust the weights of each ore according to availability and consumption. That way you get coal at the start but later when you switched to solar or uranium less and less coal will be spawned. Just enough for plastic production. Or if you go for the "steam all the way" badge you get more coal ore.

Since ore is spawned way outside the already visible area there would be a huge delay for the weights to adjust to the player style. So this might only have an affect for mega bases or train worlds. But it could be fun.

[Aardwolf]

Predictable starting areas and resources does sound a bit boring actually!

Would be fun to have a world setting for "anything goes". Where anything could happen, e.g. survival in the middle of a forest with few resources and being required to explore to find a better spot for your base...

Or survival in the middle of a lake, but then please allow bridges, rafts, swimming, wading, launching self by catapult, jetpacks, hovercrafts, terraforming or some other way to cross water

[mrvn]

Predictable starting areas and resources does sound a bit boring actually!

Would be fun to have a world setting for "anything goes". Where anything could happen, e.g. survival in the middle of a forest with few resources and being required to explore to find a better spot for your base...

Or survival in the middle of a lake, but then please allow bridges, rafts, swimming, wading, launching self by catapult, jetpacks, hovercrafts, terraforming or some other way to cross water

Waterworld, you have to build a raft before you drown. And then dive for your ores. And don't drop your one and only tree seedling, you need it to make more trees and thus enlarge your raft.

[Zavian]

Waterworld, you have to build a raft before you drown. And then dive for your ores. And don't drop your one and only tree seedling, you need it to make more trees and thus enlarge your raft.

Sounds very similar to Seablock. viewtopic.php?f=95&t=43759 .

[Sente]

Predictable starting areas and resources does sound a bit boring actually!

Would be fun to have a world setting for "anything goes". Where anything could happen, e.g. survival in the middle of a forest with few resources and being required to explore to find a better spot for your base...

Or survival in the middle of a lake, but then please allow bridges, rafts, swimming, wading, launching self by catapult, jetpacks, hovercrafts, terraforming or some other way to cross water

Waterworld, you have to build a raft before you drown. And then dive for your ores. And don't drop your one and only tree seedling, you need it to make more trees and thus enlarge your raft.

Don't know why you're talking about enlarging the raft. I was thinking about building the catapult for self-launching.

[TheRaph]

Regarding resource balance. I really like that you want to address resource generation. And I am even more excited about you being ready to look into recipes.
I would like to point out several things that would help with this:

• Steel requiring 5 Iron Plates is too much making steel smelting area an enormous monstrocity for generally no game value. Also 5 is a bad value so making it at least 4 would be a good thing.
• Copper wires requirement for expensive mode Green Circuits is also too much and 10 is also a bad value. Make it 8 to make design much more beautiful. Also 5 is generally a much worse value than 4. You could also look into shifting the price into making wires consume 2 copper per cycle instead of 1, and lower requirement of copper wires on green circuits to a more reasonable value like 4.

And ofcourse the resource generator code is always welcome to be looked at. RSO mod is so popular for a reason.

Totally disagree!

If every ratio in game is even ,were is the fun to riddle things out?

The odd ratio and different need of resources for every process drives the player to think about it. And so there are different solutions for optimisation of every process. If all ratios are evenly dividable it would result in every Base looks the same ... sounds boring.

You are right in optimizing some recipes to need more copper and less iron to even it out, but I think they shuld not change it to make ratios easier to calculate and making every Base looks the same.

[Dreepa]

Resources at the start need to be reliable but not too much in quantity.
They need get bigger and richer the farther out they are. Progressing with distance as well as challenge.

[Boneslayer2]

I like the idea very much but I want to discourage from creating live fires on game start as this will generate a hell of a ton of pollution and will attract biters before the player is actually ready to meet them.

This could be countered by setting a negative pollution value at the start of the game.

[galibert]

Resources at the start need to be reliable but not too much.
They need get bigger and richer the farther out they are. Progressing with distance as well as challenge.

That's the exact current state.

OG.

[Jap2.0]

I like the idea very much but I want to discourage from creating live fires on game start as this will generate a hell of a ton of pollution and will attract biters before the player is actually ready to meet them.

This could be countered by setting a negative pollution value at the start of the game.

I believe I heard something about a lack of support for negative pollution - I could be wrong, though.

[torham]

I like the idea very much but I want to discourage from creating live fires on game start as this will generate a hell of a ton of pollution and will attract biters before the player is actually ready to meet them.

This could be countered by setting a negative pollution value at the start of the game.

I believe I heard something about a lack of support for negative pollution - I could be wrong, though.

There was a crash associated with a mod that created negative pollution. I believe that has been fixed now.

[mrvn]

I like the idea very much but I want to discourage from creating live fires on game start as this will generate a hell of a ton of pollution and will attract biters before the player is actually ready to meet them.

This could be countered by setting a negative pollution value at the start of the game.

I believe I heard something about a lack of support for negative pollution - I could be wrong, though.

There was a crash associated with a mod that created negative pollution. I believe that has been fixed now.

Does that show up as a green tint on the map view then?

[Escadin]

Passenger seat for vehicles (Rseding91)

Just a minor multiplayer feature.

Thank you! Glad at least one of my suggestions made it through

[Rseding91]

Will it be possible for the driver to control one weapon while the passenger controls another (e.g. driver fires main cannon while passenger fires machine gun)?

No.

[Rseding91]

What are the controls like on the tank? Can the driver control the wheels while the passenger controls the cannon? That would be super cool!

There will be a toggle that can switch who controls the weapons(driver or passenger). So the driver can drive while the passenger can shoot.

Can we get additional information, such as

Will trains have passenger seats? Will modders be able to specify number of passenger seats? How are different vehicle functions/guns allocated? What does this mean for network syncing?

No, no, one of the two players controls the guns depending on the setting in the vehicle. It means nothing for network syncing it's just game logic like if you sat in a train.

[Jon8RFC]

Will trains have passenger seats?

This may be old information to you, but maybe others don't know, or don't attempt to hitch a ride on a long train on a high-latency multiplayer server and can't find out on accident. Each cargo wagon can hold a player.

[Rseding91]

Will trains have passenger seats?

This may be old information to you, but maybe others don't know, or don't attempt to hitch a ride on a long train on a high-latency multiplayer server and can't find out on accident. Each cargo wagon can hold a player.

? There are no issues with riding in trains in MP. I fixed the one issue a few months ago.