[MOD 0.14] Alien Biomes

[DoxxMulder]

So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

[Earendel]

So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

Yeah the autoplace settings are awkward to configure, that's why I didn't release the preview version.

In v0.3.5 (uploading now):

If over 255 tiles are in data.raw the game won't load, so tiles are removed (replaced with landfill) until it will load an you can access the menu. This at least lets you access the menu and disable mods that add tiles you don't need, or you can play that way if you don't mind missing those tiles. You can see what is removed in your log file.

Some rogue tree and tile layer order problems should also be fixed.

[evildogbot100]

I noticed that a lot of assets are just a recolor of each other, is it possible to just use tint while referring to the same file to reduce atlas? Also to reduce file size as well.

Edit : it's actually impossible for terrain but fine for decoratives viewtopic.php?f=25&t=56680

[Earendel]

I'll give that a go once tile can be recolored / tinted.

[jooe]

Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

[Earendel]

Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

[Earendel]

Oh, there is an update ready to go but I can't upload it to the mod portal because of a mod portal bug.

[Termak]

Is it just me or does Alien Biomes disable almost all cliffs, i havent really seen any besides 2 spots of 3*3 minicliffs at my spawnpoint.
Default terrain settings minus low/big water.

[jooe]

Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

I can reproduce the issue with my currently active mods list. Using the mods-list.json attached to this post works fine, but when you change "enabled": true to "enabled": false for alien-biomes-hr-terrain factorio does not load because of the tile limit error. I could not reproduce the case where factorio loads but the save file doesn't, maybe it was because earlier I tried disabling other mods to get below the 255 tiles limit ...
btw what I say is for factorio 0.16.16 (0.16.18 has some new issues with my mods ...), version for linux x64, running in Fedora 27

[Earendel]

Is it just me or does Alien Biomes disable almost all cliffs, i havent really seen any besides 2 spots of 3*3 minicliffs at my spawnpoint.
Default terrain settings minus low/big water.

It shouldn't, the elevation layer is not affected. The only change to cliffs is to make them slightly transparent so they don't clash with different rock colours as much.

[Earendel]

Problem: Disabling Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain makes me go over 255 tile limit and breaks save game

I am playing a heavily modded game which includes Alien Biomes and the Alien Biomes High-Res Terrain (I somehow thought that would look nicer ...)
Now as I cannot really play in high-res anyways because of hardware limitations, I thought I'd disable the high-res terrain. Bad idea: 1. Without disabling any other mods (Dectorio etc.) factorio stops loading with the tile limit error message. 2. When disabling the other mods, factorio loads fine. But still I cannot open my save game.

Does high-res terrain somehow decrease the number of tiles?

No, all it does is add some textures in a graphics folder. If Alien Biomes is still installed then you shouldn't see a 255 error message, so maybe you uninstalled both somehow?

I can reproduce the issue with my currently active mods list. Using the mods-list.json attached to this post works fine, but when you change "enabled": true to "enabled": false for alien-biomes-hr-terrain factorio does not load because of the tile limit error. I could not reproduce the case where factorio loads but the save file doesn't, maybe it was because earlier I tried disabling other mods to get below the 255 tiles limit ...
btw what I say is for factorio 0.16.16 (0.16.18 has some new issues with my mods ...), version for linux x64, running in Fedora 27

I can't recreate the problem. I've checked the code and the only thing in data.raw that it changes with/without the hr mod is whether or not a high res texture file is specified, nothing else changes. I guess having the mod there might change the load order of something so maybe a different mod adds another tile in after the alien biomes final fixes tries to work around the 255 limit. The thing is, the workaround was made so people can get to the menu to disable some mods without hacking their files. Since you can do that anyway, you just need to disable mods that are adding too many tiles.

[jooe]

I can't recreate the problem. I've checked the code and the only thing in data.raw that it changes with/without the hr mod is whether or not a high res texture file is specified, nothing else changes. I guess having the mod there might change the load order of something so maybe a different mod adds another tile in after the alien biomes final fixes tries to work around the 255 limit. The thing is, the workaround was made so people can get to the menu to disable some mods without hacking their files. Since you can do that anyway, you just need to disable mods that are adding too many tiles.

Of course you're right, it doesn't matter that much and I can play the game (and even continue my save) if I just keep my settings - I was just curious about the strangeness of what happened. Thanks for trying to find out and for your great work on this mod

[DoxxMulder]

So despite significant performance increase since updating to the most recent iteration of this mod, I still get FPS/UPS drops when fully zoomed out. 60/60 to ~37/37. Not sure if this is a problem with Alien Biomes or factorio in general.

ALSO

A lot of the decoratives aren't removed by placing concrete over them. Which makes the concrete look very strange when it's all covered in craters and dirt. Is this planned to be fixed at some point?

[RocketManChronicles]

I noticed that a lot of the terrain details, such as lava lakes, dirt patches, etc lay over the stone and concrete floor layers. Is this intended?

EDIT: Haha, see comment above mine.

[Anson]

using Alien Biomes 0.3.7 and (Alien Biomes HR 0.3.1), i just found different behavior depending on whether the HR textures are enabled or not.

when i tried last week with older versions, missing tiles crashed some other mods. thus i started a new map for some tests with no mods at all, and came back to a modded game only today after i had read that Alien Biomes did some "new tricks". but i still have problems:

after enabling a nice large collection of mods, including Alien Biomes (but not the HR textures), factorio no longer wanted to start because of the "255 limit", with options only to "disable ALL mods", "restart", or "exit", giving no option to use the internal mod handler to disable some specific mods or change their mod configuration.

some lines from the logfile

some lines from the logfile:
21.012 Loading mod alien-biomes 0.3.7 (data-final-fixes.lua)
21.036 Script @__alien-biomes__/data-final-fixes.lua:166: More than 255 tiles are defined, the game will not load unless some are removed.
21.184 Script @__alien-biomes__/data-final-fixes.lua:216: Tile 0 included: out-of-map
... lots of included tiles, among them around 180 from Alien Biomes and 60 from Asphalt Roads ...
21.186 Script @__alien-biomes__/data-final-fixes.lua:241: Tile 255 included: Arci-marking-yellow-dl-left-turn-left
21.186 Script @__alien-biomes__/data-final-fixes.lua:245: Tile 256 excluded: bi-solar-mat
... and 5 more excluded tiles, then lots of data-final-fixes from other mods and other messages, and finally
24.406 Error ModManager.cpp:1023: Reached id limit for tile. The game can't contain more than 255 instances of this prototype due to hardcoded limits of the engine.

to not lose my selection of mods, i didn't "disable all mods", but had to "exit" and then manually find and edit the json file.
just out of curiosity, i did not disable any mods (neither Alien Biomes nor any others), and instead enabled the HR textures.

and now the surprise: factorio started with no single error or warning messages!

a quick glance at the logfiles

a quick glance at the logfiles (with and without HR textures) showed that most was the same (especially the load order of almost everything), except:
- settings.lua, data.lua and data-updates.lua (all without HR) : Alien Biomes was alphabetically loaded as one of the first mods.
- settings.lua with HR : Alien Biomes was loaded only as one of the last, together with 4 other mods after the end of the alphabet (YARM)
- data.lua with HR : as one of the first mods, Alien Biomes HR Terrain was loaded instead of Alien Biomes, and Alien Biomes only after YARM again.
- data-updates.lua with HR : same as settings.lua - only as one of the last, only after YARM again.
- data-final-fixes.lua (and this is probably the most important) : again same as all others - without HR as one of the first mods in alphabetical order, but with HR only as one of the last in a group after the end of the alphabet again.
the following list of 255 included and 5 excluded tiles was identical (followed by lots of mods where i don't know whether they added more tiles), but with HR textures, also #261 was excluded (heli-pad-concrete which appeared nowhere in the list when HR was disabled), and then only three more mods with data-final-fixes.
for all sections, the Helicopters mod always appeared after Alien Biomes when HR textures was disabled, and before Alien Biomes when the textures were enabled. that would explain why tile #261 was only handled in one case, and why in the other case factorio aborted with the 255 error.

to me it looks as if your solution with the reduction of tiles is only a "quick&dirty" hack. as long as it works it's fine, but it's very probable to hit situations where it no longer works and then i have to clean up mods myself without knowing which mods add how many tiles. in the long run, a more robust and permanent solution seems to be needed which solves the problem for all mods and similar conflicts. i am no modder and have no idea how to implement ID and tile management, maybe even some addition to the game itself (by the devs) is needed?

since Alien Biomes is a huge contributor to those IDs (>170 in the above list, next is Asphalt with >50 and then <30 for all others) and if you don't have a better idea yourself, another temporary solution might be to reduce the number of different biomes, either automatically reducing them so long until few enough remain, or disabling them all at first and letting the user select which ones he wants.
until then I'll try running a map with HR textures, and if that doesn't work perfectly then select the simplest solution for me, to remove the single mod which uses up more than 70% of the IDs :-(

[Earendel]

The decals appearing over concrete problem should be fixed as of 0.3.8.

For people hitting the 255 tile limit, the best thing you can do is ask the Factorio devs to increase the 255 tile limit to something much larger. The problem is only going to get worse as people add more and more mods to their games.

[FuryoftheStars]

For people hitting the 255 tile limit, the best thing you can do is ask the Factorio devs to increase the 255 tile limit to something much larger. The problem is only going to get worse as people add more and more mods to their games.

Here's an existing thread if people what to chime in on it, but the devs have already said "no".

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=56619

This limit won't be ever increased. I am sorry.

Anyway 255 is very reasonable maximum number of tile types. Vanilla uses just 31, so mods can still add more than 200 tile types. Go complain to the mod creators to keep their usage of tiles reasonable

[Earendel]

This would be another solution: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=56680

There's also the possibility of having more of the terrain variation done using decals, but that would be a much bigger performance drain, plus a lot of people have them switched off.

Oh also, if the API command for surface.regenerate_decorative() worked the same way as initial spawning then I could do more on my terrain regeneration script, in which case adding and removing tiles would be less of an issue so I could add mod options to disable sets of tiles.

[2xRon]

On the latest update 0.16.20, my game crashes when I try to place landfill. Doesn't happen if I toggle Alien Biomes off and toggling AB HD textures has no effect.

Code: Select all

  45.829 Error MainLoop.cpp:1016: Exception at tick 2034299: Error while running event LandfillPainting::on_player_built_tile (ID 45)
__LandfillPainting__/control.lua:13: attempt to index field 'next_direction' (a nil value)

Code: Select all

Modlist
aai-industry_0.2.2.zip              
aai-signals_0.3.1.zip               
aai-zones_0.3.1.zip                 
AdequateBotStart_0.16.1.zip         
alien-biomes-hr-terrain_0.3.1.zip   
alien-biomes_0.3.8.zip              
angelsaddons-oresilos_0.4.0.zip     
angelsaddons-pressuretanks_0.3.0.zip
angelsaddons-warehouses_0.3.0.zip   
angelsbioprocessing_0.5.2.zip       
angelscomponents_0.2.0.zip          
angelsinfiniteores_0.7.3.zip        
angelslogistics_0.2.1.zip           
angelspetrochem_0.7.5.zip           
angelsrefining_0.9.8.zip            
angelssmelting_0.4.2.zip            
auto-research_4.0.2.zip             
beautiful_bridge_railway_0.1.1.zip  
BigBags_1.0.28.zip                  
bobassembly_0.16.0.zip              
bobelectronics_0.16.0.zip           
bobenemies_0.16.0.zip               
bobinserters_0.16.4.zip             
boblibrary_0.16.3.zip               
boblogistics_0.16.4.zip             
bobmining_0.16.0.zip                
bobmodules_0.16.0.zip               
bobores_0.16.2.zip                  
bobplates_0.16.0.zip                
bobpower_0.16.1.zip                 
bobtech_0.16.0.zip                  
bobwarfare_0.16.2.zip               
Bottleneck_0.9.1.zip                
even-distribution_0.2.8.zip         
FARL_2.0.4.zip                      
FNEI_0.0.17.zip                     
Foreman_3.0.1.zip                   
helmod_0.7.6.zip                    
LandfillPainting_0.2.1.zip          
LoaderRedux_1.2.2.zip               
LogisticTrainNetwork_1.7.1.zip      
mlist                               
mod-list.json                       
mod-settings.json                   
Nanobots_2.0.2.zip                  
nixie-tubes_0.16.3.zip              
Nuclear Fuel_0.1.3.zip              
only-smelting_0.1.4.zip             
rso-mod_3.5.6.zip                   
ScienceCostTweaker_0.16.1.zip       
ShinyAngelGFX_0.16.3.zip            
ShinyBobGFX_0.16.9.zip              
SpaceMod_0.3.4.zip                  
Squeak Through_1.2.1.zip            
Teleportation_0.16.1.zip

Save game file attached. Please let me know if there's any other information that could help.


Update
The crash doesn't happen if I remove the LandfillPainting mod. So, maybe there is some interaction between Alien Biomes and LandfillPainting?

[gctypo]

So I've been using the beta version the mod you've posted in here and I've noticed severe performance issues. I recently upgraded to a 1080ti so I was really blindsided when I can run Doom at 60fps but not factorio. I think it has to do with the sheer number of decoratives placed by this mod. I didn't have the same issues with my old card, but I also used to run sprite resolution at normal instead of high.

I don't really want to turn down the graphics options, does anyone have any tips to increase performance? I've been getting ~37fps/ups fully zoomed out.

EDIT: nevermind, didn't realize I was two versions behind, getting 60/60 now

I have similar issues with 0.3.8. Zooming out causes my FPS to very quickly drop to under 10, going all the way down to 5 at full view. I'm using a much older card though, a GTX 760, but I get a full 60 FPS when the mod is disabled, regardless of zoom.

EDIT: Tried to recreate the lag again today and it's fine all of a sudden.