Friday Facts #221 - 0.16 is out

[Serenity]

The underground thing always seemed to be an exploit. So good riddance. But otherwise achieving compression shouldn't require contraptions. That's just a workaround to get what seems like an essential feature of belts. It should happen naturally in most cases. As said, there is already too much of an incentive to use bots, so belts should be as intuitive and simple as possible.

[Zeblote]

Compressing with underground belts wouldn't be necessary at all it inserters compressed properly in the first place, I always thought it looked really ugly when someone used it.

[Meddleman]

Everyone's worrying about belt compression, but I'm ecstatic seeing all those t-shirt packages ^^

If you're sending one to Österreich/Austria, it could be me!
Too bad I can't ask for an autograph from Albert & co. on my box without giving away personal details
The graphics are beautiful, although I miss the brightly coloured yellow sand for the desert biome. Still, having a toned down colour palette for the natural elements will help lend to the industrial atmosphere once a player has made significant changes to the environment in-game.

[mh_]

Just so I say it again: When thinking of about inserters and transport belts I think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRS-EzZHWWY
1) Could we just discuss how a inserter should back up a belt for something to insert? It can't!
2) When sideloading a belt in real life it would overflow when already full. We have the mechanics of a belt backing up. This is the only thing a belt could do when you try to insert onto a full belt (a belt with holes that don't fit a whole item) via sideloading. The sidebelt should not back up the main belt for the items to fit onto it.
At least that's what you get when thinking about real life logic.

With the splitters factorio has a easy way of compressing a belt. We do not need anything more. Sideloading and especially inserters are not belt compressing as the are not in real life. True that this might complicate designs that might be easier or more compact with past underground inserters or sideloading. But if you want it simple, why not just take a rocket silo, that already has everything in it and launch it right away. Right, because that's boring.

[AnarCon]

The first shipment of 786 packages was sent Wednesday morning, which included all the orders places before midnight on Tuesday. As of this morning, we only have 800 T-shirts left, we ordered a batch of 3,000 more, but they wont' arrive till the new year.

As you can expect, this week has been quite hectic for us, but nonetheless, we are looking forward to reading your thoughts and comments on our forum.

YES! the perfect xmas present to myself from myself, thank you THANK YOU!!!!

edit: uhm.. took 3 of u to do tihs.... WHERES THE AUTOMATION?

[AutomationIsFun]

I really liked optimisationsa in 0.16 especially with belts.
About belt compression.
First of all it puzzeled me for a while when I first started why belts don't compress automatically. It was annoying and frustrating for a while.
Full compression by default is pretty intuitive to me - if there is a space on belt things should be able to use it.
Underground trick was not intuitive and I undeerstand why it was removed.
Sideloading compressing a belt is intuitive to me - the item flows to any space it has.
At the moment my biggest concerns are mining and smelting - miners should always compress a belt - it is very trublesome to do splitters inside your mining arrays, smelting is pretty much the same but not as bad.

[Tomycj]

Side loading and inserters should definitely compress belts! Otherwise you would have to put big, unnecessary splitter setups after everything that is supposed to handle a compressed belt of stuff. That wouldn't be an interesting mechanic, just annoying repetition once you figured it out.

Please, at least make stack inserters to be able to compress a belt, just like they said in Xterminators' FFF discussion

[Tomycj]

So many bug fixes so fast it's amazing!

It's good that you removed using underground belts to compress belts, it felt cheaty to do it and it's unintuitive.
But I think side loading is a legitimate way to compress a belt

This is not cool and I don't like it:

But that is just using side loading to transfer items! Personally I love how it looks...

[mh_]

I really liked optimisationsa in 0.16 especially with belts.
About belt compression.
First of all it puzzeled me for a while when I first started why belts don't compress automatically. It was annoying and frustrating for a while.
Full compression by default is pretty intuitive to me - if there is a space on belt things should be able to use it.
Underground trick was not intuitive and I undeerstand why it was removed.
Sideloading compressing a belt is intuitive to me - the item flows to any space it has.
At the moment my biggest concerns are mining and smelting - miners should always compress a belt - it is very trublesome to do splitters inside your mining arrays, smelting is pretty much the same but not as bad.

The sideloading and inserter compression will still work as long as there is enough space on the belt. How is that not logical?
As for mining: just give the mines two outputs, one to the right, one to the left, and join those on the outside of the mining field, BOOM compression! Undergrounds may be used to put the miners closer so the mining rate is higher.

[Kunstduenger]

My opinion on belt compression is that splitters and sideloading should work, but not inserters or underground belts.

I completely agree, though I'm also willing to trade sideloading compression for performance, since there are workarounds.

I get the feeling that this design is intentionally overcomplicated:


Here is a design i used even before 0.16 because I never was a fan of the underground belt compression trick

[Schorty]

I feel like everything should be able to fully compress a belt. For a new player it's really unintuitive, that some "wierd contraption" is making the belts more full. Please make it work (again)!

BTW: The T-Shirts are awesome! \o/

[sicklag]

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[Zulan]

Just to add another everything should compress.

On sideloading, I have the strong opinion that it should compress. A single splitter works only if both sides have the same item. The "solutions" for sideloading an item to a particular side have been posted, and are ugly, bulky and boring.

On inserters/miners (be it underground or normal belt) my opinion is not as strong. We all have gotten used to the various solutions using sideloading, splitters or undergorund belt. They certainly have an appeal, and can feel like a puzzle to solve. However, I think the inconvenience of repeatedly applying the same solution as well as the unintuitiveness for new players outweighs the little puzzle aspect. I think if from 0.16.5 on everything compresses, then we will soon look back just like we looked back on corner compression now.

[sicklag]

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[hitzu]

Aside from the compression holywar I would like to talk about the

NEW PAVEMENT

First of all: I really like those new textures, they are great and wonderful. The game gets better and prettier every major update and that's great! So here is my feedback:

I cannot give you visual examples 'cause my saves won't load so I'll try to explain.
First: New concrete texture is great, but it's not the concrete. It looks just like brick pavement.
Second: It's odd that "fastest" pavement goes on top of the "slowest". Usually, it's vice versa.

So what I suggest:

• -Rename recipes. Current cobblestone pavement should be made out of just stone and the current concrete pavement should be the brickstone pavement made out of bricks.
  -Add new pavement: true smooth concrete. With the introduction of decals and masks, it shouldn't be hard to make large slabs of concrete with seams that don't conform the grid.
  -Reverse the order of sinking: concrete which acts and looks like a carriageway should be above the ground but below every other pavement. Brickstone as a sidewalk pavement should be raised above the concrete. And the cobblestone as the cheapest should be used as the structures' foundation and go on top of everything else.

Bonus: Pavement should hide rail ballast and slippers.

[BlackHat]

My 2 cents.... Miners should be equivalent to side loading... (After all thats what they look like they are doing pushing the load from the miner on to the belt) They should be able to compress a belt.. On the other hand I dont think they should be able to stop the main belt to insert their items... I dont know what the setting were (or currently are) but i would say if the gap on the main belt was more than say 75% the size of an item then the miner or side load should be able to insert into that gap. (The debate would be what gap size percentage to allow items to be inserted)

As for inserting into Underground belt for compression... I am for it... For the reason that it allows Options... I am not restricted to just one method of compressing a belt... (Splitters)

So I would like to see more options... I am all for using All methods... Inserters (using the same Gap Size % discussed above?), Side-Load, Undergrounds, Splitters. This means you have different style bases, instead of everyone's base looking the same cause there is only 1 way to compress a belt...


Concrete...
I have not played with .16 yet, but do remember the concrete prototype shone in a previous FF.... If that is what is being used in .16, then I have to agree with what others have said... Use that for the Stone Brick pattern. NOT for concrete.
I would prefer concrete look more uniform... MAYBE you could use the new pattern, but with MUCH reduced variations in color and section height variations. (IT should NOT look like a coblestone pattern)

[lyoneel]

IMO sideloading compress is ok, make sense is intuitive, underground compressing is a huge bug exploited, but if you think as a designer/developer of game only will be compressed via splitters, go on.

Really is impressive why people is annoying about this, this game is about resolving problems, so, you got a new one, solve it , people likes complain about everything.

See ya, and keep this excelent work... as usual !!!.

Merry Xmas and Happy new year (?)

[GeneralBismark]

Hey guys i know all the talk is about compression and i'll leave them all to it. I would however like to make a recommendation. I like the fact that splitters and undergrounds can replace normal belts. I don't like however that normal belts can easily replace the underground and splitters. That replacement method makes it take more time than it used to to upgrade belts. And if you mess up in an area with a lot of belts it might make a really big mess that you get lost trying to fix. So in short if you could make it a one way easy replace that would be great i would appreciate it at the very least.

[AndreasTPC]

I would be in favor of adding in more items that manage belt flow, in addition to the splitter. Use these to get intended ways of doing the things people have been doing via bugs. Would solve the problem, and add some cool new toys to play with that we could use to come up with new designs that aren't possible today. I wouldn't mind some more complexity being added to the game when it comes to belt management.

Sideloading should probably still be fixed however.

[pieinvestigator]

The way that belt worked before 0.16 was preformance heavy, the way it works now has only one compression method. We can't have it all... or can we?

I propose that the developers make a new belt segment that allows the removed 'jostling' in only that segment. This should be easy to implement, only requiring some backreferencing and a new sprite for this to work.

A slightly more complex belt to implement would be some sort of segmenter or portioner, it would cause items that go through it to visually fit into troughs of the belt. Therefore causing gaps to only be wide enough to fit a whole number of items in them, allowing inserters or sideloading to work with the segment or later on if there is no backlog to recompress those gaps.

For added player frustration it could only be available in one speed, or it could be two tiles long, or it could prevent players and vehicles from moving with or away from the push. Then again that last 'feature' could wreak havoc on biters.