Friday Facts #219 - Cliffs

[palmic]

We need ability to build Chernobyl power plant design now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

i am dreaming bout this from first year in factorio.

[Ripshaft]

SQUEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee!!!! (uncontainable girlish squeal)

Oh god I am so psyched to see cliffs being something you guys are working on, that is AMAAAAZZZINNNNNGGG!!! more terrain restrictions makes for good automation challenges!

[FactorioParadox]

Ok this is very very cool. I was about to say "underground pipes/belts should not work, cliffs are simply impossible to get through, to avoid fixing the problem" but here the solution is incredibly elegant. Underground belt that switch to this form like does mining drill on uranium ores.

Factorio Team you are astonishing.

Alternatively, have separate entities for transporting items and fluids up and down cliffs. The fluid one would especially be interesting as you could make things flow "downhill" without the need for a pump, though that might be a tad exploitive, (edit) thus allowing you to create long pipelines without pumps if you happen to find a cliff in a convenient location if I understand fluid physics correctly.

[Satellence]

The attachment fff-219-cliffs-05.png is no longer available

connections??
if 2 Cliffs are opposite, what will the connection of underground pipes and underground conveyors look like? bad english, sorry.

I guess Red. Like every other 2D isometric game upper cliff shifts placed objects.
Also with pipes:

pipe.png (164.49 KiB) Viewed 9315 times

Satellence wrote:
Also for better view upper terrain should be little bright.
terrain.gif

I think you can have a "cliff on a cliff", and therefore "2 levels" of land. I think its alright that gameplay-wise the cliff remain a natural impassable wall.

0 level +0 bright
1 level +10 bright
2 level +20 bright
...

Also what to do with NOT-O shaped cliffs? Say, L, C or I shaped? How to make transition between brightness levels?
Even if it is possible, result probably won't be worth efforts.

Just like in other games make ramp or other terrain deformation

The attachment fff-219-cliffs-05.png is no longer available

[dee-]

Dudes -- the Factorio cliffs are beautiful, I really like them, but from a game-internal view they are nothing else than a impassable, unmineable wall.

There is no "up" and "down", not even the concept of it! So "diagonal" pipes or belts, shooting "uphill" or "downhill" or highlighting the "higher ground" are utterly meaningless as they rely on a concept that is not implemented and has nothing to do with these "cliffs".

And even when it was - what should happen to a pipe, that is diagonal, because it ran down a cliff, and then the ciiff is removed? Please tell me.

[TatsuZZMage]

Personally, I'd make it more complicated to blow the cliffs up say have the "demolition charges" need to be rigged then connected via circut wire to a power switch and have a large blast radius and all the cliffs connected need to be destroyed at once, But that's me.

Love the cliffs tho

[bobingabout]

See... I look at the cliffs, I like them, but the issue I have is how it affects the grid.

The way it is implemented, I'd think it doesn't affect the grid, however, having actual slopes and ramps would make the cliffs feel better... but also hamper the construction area, can't build on non-flat things.

I like that you can blow up cliffs in your way though.

[Ekibanuch]

Looks familiar

[Matthias_Wlkp]

See... I look at the cliffs, I like them, but the issue I have is how it affects the grid.

The way it is implemented, I'd think it doesn't affect the grid, however, having actual slopes and ramps would make the cliffs feel better... but also hamper the construction area, can't build on non-flat things.

I like that you can blow up cliffs in your way though.

Your second paragraph seems to be correct - cliffs are laid out like a wall, so they are "fake cliffs". There is no actual elevation change - it's all flat.

[mrvn]

And landfills in water should work exactly the opposite way... slowly filled up bit by bit.

I'm working on a mod for Sea Block that consists of an entity that you place at the edge of land, feed it landfill (or crushed stone) and it will slowly fill in the water around it.

First version will just fill all water around it up to some radius. Second version I want more of a vehicle type thing that you place at the end of a belt and feed with landfill, fuel and belts. It will then fill in any water in front of it (and a bit to the sides). Next it moves itself forward one meter and places a new belt segment behind it.

[keldonorno]

so do we get jetpacks for our power armor or like a grappling hook so we can scale cliffs ?

[loneredwolf]

Thank you for providing amore diverse terrain in the game. The ability to "flatten the world" to force fit generic factories makes the game weaker. The game needs a force working against you to encourage creative solutions. As the game stands, too much can be blueprinted and stamped down, reducing the problem to a known set of solutions.

A feature I would love to see is 'badlands' or mountainous terrain which cannot be traversed by the player, but the bugs can easily cross. This would force the player to build around these areas, making a more interesting factory and solving critical space challenges, while also defending an irregular terrain.

I recently played an island start, which took enemies out of the initial equation, but made for challenging space constraints and more creative solutions. There was also a driving goal to get off the island to acquire the necessary resources to finish out the science.

[HurkWurk]

i think its a mod that allows landfill to replace terrain with grass. it would be a good idea to allow it to replace cliffs with its underlying tile type for those that want to terraform.

[grimdanfango]

Wow, this is probably the single feature I've thought would improve the game the most significantly (for the way I tend to play - exploratively), but I never even mentioned it because I figured it'd be so far down the priority list or even something you actively didn't think would fit the game.

I'm overjoyed to see it implemented, and pretty much exactly the way I'd hoped (mirroring the lovely ol' C&C cliff tiles approach).

Fantastic work as always, keep it up guys!


(Just thought, dunno if anyone's suggested it - an interesting tweak might be to allow behemoth biters to climb cliffs, so previously safe perimeter defences become compromised later in the game)

[QGamer]

One question: will cliffs be placeable in the map editor?

[QuantumForce]

Nice progress! I look forward to future FFs about cliffs:

• How will underground pipes/conveyors connect?
• How will the ends of cliffs look? Making the transition from flat to cliff could be tricky, especially for short gaps. Maybe cliffs should transition graphically into something like a steep hill?
• How does the actual sprite generation work? This FF discusses how to decide which edges are blocked, but it looks like within a tile the cliff location can weave around a bit. Going from the entity locations to drawing the sprites seems like it would have some interesting work behind it.

I guess you tried it, but it does feel like the current elevation-free approach is going to cause some consistency issues in the future. I feel like I'd rather have multiple closely-spaced cliffs rather than a paradoxical elevation model. For instance, with the current cliffs-are-walls model what's to stop this situation:

Paradoxical Cliffs

factorio_cliffs.png (558.99 KiB) Viewed 9014 times

It seems like it would be better in the long run to have consistent elevations. That way cliffs can generally just follow the isolines. Placing sprites is then pretty easy to solve using marching squares.

[morhp]

For instance, with the current cliffs-are-walls model what's to stop this situation:

Well, the cliff generation still seems to be based on the internal heightmap, so unless you place cliffs like this manually in the map editor or whatever, such a situation shouldn't happen naturally.

Also, there is already a screenshot that shows how the ends look like: https://eu1.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... ffs-05.png (bottom left)

[TOGoS]

Dudes -- the Factorio cliffs are beautiful, I really like them, but from a game-internal view they are nothing else than a impassable, unmineable wall.

Thanks! And yup.

There is no "up" and "down", not even the concept of it! So "diagonal" pipes or belts, shooting "uphill" or "downhill" or highlighting the "higher ground" are utterly meaningless as they rely on a concept that is not implemented and has nothing to do with these "cliffs".

And even when it was - what should happen to a pipe, that is diagonal, because it ran down a cliff, and then the ciiff is removed? Please tell me.

That is exactly right. I've thought about how a belt crossing under a cliff could be shifted down on the down side, but there's just too many weird edge cases (think also about blueprints), especially since cliffs can be removed. To do it properly would require building the concept of elevation into the graphics engine, and nobody here wants to do that. Even when things do show up in 3D (e.g. grenades flying up and over things) it's on a case-by-case this-particular-type-of-entity-knows-how-to-draw-itself-at-a-different-position-on-the-screen-based-on-its-height basis. The core of the engine has no idea that there's a third dimension.

[Engimage]

... especially since cliffs can be removed.

This is what I wanted to hear!

[QuantumForce]

For instance, with the current cliffs-are-walls model what's to stop this situation:

Well, the cliff generation still seems to be based on the internal heightmap, so unless you place cliffs like this manually in the map editor or whatever, such a situation shouldn't happen naturally.

In fact, the post explicitly states that it is not based on the elevation function:

In the end I removed the slope calculation. We still check that edges cross a threshold elevation, but instead of using slope as the second factor for cliff placement, there's an additional noise layer called 'cliffiness' which applies equally to the north-south and east-west edges.

So if cliffiness expressed in the right pattern I think you could get the situation above. Probably not in such a small area, but over larger distances such inconsistent cliffs might be seen in game.