Friday Facts #228 - High resolution turrets

[dgw]

Well I know which mod won't be updated for 0.17... Beamed lasers in vanilla? Yes!

I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that the personal laser defense gets beams too, for consistency.

[Rhamphoryncus]

What's going on with the terrain here:

This is probably the known issue issue that'll get fixed properly in 0.17. For now it's very subtle so they don't want to break 0.16 any further.

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=57043&p=337815&hil ... re#p337848

[kaivanes]

I don’t know what your build train looks like, but have you considered AddressSanitizer (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html)? It provides very similar information to Valgrind (no leak checking) but only incurs about a 2x performance penalty vs the ~20x penalty of Valgrind. This is definitely not something you would want to deploy as part of a default production build, but the performance penalty is small enough that the game would still be playable on most reasonable computers/maps. The advantage here is that you can have instrumentation in a real running game, and potentially catch the edge cases that your tests aren’t covering.

This could be deployed as an internal test build, but you could also include it as an optional build of the development branch and allow people experiencing corruption issues to opt in and help with the debugging. Applications built with AddressSanitizer exit with a stack trace on the first instance of memory corruption, so not only would this help debug it would actually prevent corruption in the short term by virtue of halting the game process before it had a chance to write the corrupted state to disk. This would still result in a loss of play time, but only as far back as the last auto save: by making the error fatal you prevent the corruption from spreading to all manual/auto saves of the map before the user notices.

[Tricorius]

I don’t know what your build train looks like...

My build train is a 2-4 loaded with belts, rails, and all the fixin’s to build a proper outpost.



:: cough ::

The advantage here is that you can have instrumentation in a real running game, and potentially catch the edge cases that your tests aren’t covering.

Seriously though...pretty good idea. And if you didn’t want to release the debug build to end-users you could still maybe gather the a save before corruption and a save after from the regular build and try playing to see if it is replicatable locally.

[posila]

This FFF is funny: Cosmic rays as a probable cause for multiple cases of savegame corruption, fixing bugs as a cause for more crashes. I strongly suggest to stop accepting corrupt saves from the ISS and banning weed consumption at work. Cosmic rays are a pretty rare event behind our protective magnetic field and when fixing bugs makes the software less stable, you are clearly doing it wrong.
Race conditions (does not have to be in the code actually saving the corrupted state to disk) and other code bugs are common in all sorts of code. Go, hunt 'em down and take no prisoners

How rare? In the past two weeks the players clocked ~2 500 000 hours of game time in total and we had 3 reports with mysteriously broken saves. Isn't that pretty rare? But after reading articles people posted here I agree I went too far with "cosmic ray" explanation, and it is much more likely caused by overheated or overclocked HW, or just bad RAM modules. Also I wrote that we don't know what's causing it ... it might be our bug

Does the windows version use OpenGL, or one of the direct X's?
...
To any who are curious, its an intel HD4000.

On Windows we plan to use DirectX 11 (which your card supports)

What's going on with the terrain here: ...

It's this problem 57043 amplyfied on Vaclav's computer because he runs the game in mode that reloads sprites in runtime which doesn't add extra padding to tile sprites to make it work properly with mipmaps.

I don’t know what your build train looks like, but have you considered AddressSanitizer (https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html)?

I didn't know AddressSanitizer, thanks for the tip.

[Froilen]

let's hope belt compression gets sorted out soon .

[skeller1982]

added a explanation about the macOS compatability issues to the bug-thread linked in the fff (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=54549&p=340423#p340423)

might help understanding the underlying reason and prevent similar issues in future

[MicFac]

It looks like there is terrain altitude in that screenshot? That's not something I've seen before, is that something they've talked about?

As steinio said, it's the new cliffs. Have you updated to 0.16? If you dont know how to, right click factorio in your steam library, go to properties > betas, open the dropdown menu and select "0.16.x - Latest 0.16 Experimental". Also I think some maps have no cliffs (at least my 0.16 game has no cliffs although other maps I create have).

[GGG Attitude !]

It's a good news you are talking about cliff. I'm creating a scenario and it's a hell to place them !
Can you do something, please, to improve this ? Or share some tips ? I use the key "r" rotate and right click and it's really tricky.

Also, can you add the fluid manipulation in the editor please ? It's missing.

[MicFac]

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELIASTIC!?!?!?

Wait... what?

Well, its still not completely realistic. Correct me if Im wrong but in reality You would only see a laser point on the enemy but like this it looks way cooler

[Escadin]

Absolutely love them. Great work!

We believe that the new stand fits much better to the laser turret as it doesn't need any super heavy basing, and makes the two turrets more visually distinguishable.

I get that I really do. More elegant basing totally fits laser turrets. However,... it's kinda weird that in-game logic means lighter basing = 5 times more HP compared to gun turret.

[bobucles]

Correct me if Im wrong but in reality You would only see a laser point on the enemy but like this it looks way cooler

The part of a laser you see is the part that misses its target. Instead of hitting the target it hit something along the way, scattered everywhere, and your eye sees the spot it scattered from. Pretty simple.

Light doesn't do much with plain, clean air so you wouldn't see much of a laser. But we don't have pure clean air in factorio, we have dirty smelly factory air. As the laser burrows its way through the smog it will scatter all over the place, creating a bright lovely trail.

[BHakluyt]

Hi There

I made a short example video of how easy it could be to just add the extra functionality discussed before. Please don't mind the music, was listening to some while playing and recording.

It is a bit annoying how biters attack the rails when they can't get to the train in time and want to be spiteful. Its at about 01:00 in the video. This is super annoying.

please bring this to vanilla

https://youtu.be/GF9xNhqCdo4

some more elaboration

I think to add the functionality of equipment grids to vanilla will definitely widen gameplay options at very little effort to the devs. You don't need to make new 3D models for rail cars, just make the sprite for shields an icon of a shield and equipment will seem more or less universal in use, ie it will look fitting in either personal armor grid or vehicle grids. Just dump whatever in the vehicle grid and there another million Factorians are happy. If you guys are bored and have time, adding some neat researches would be nice to increase grid size, power generators etc.

Regarding power generators, it would be nice to have then wireless charging items and regenerative units. (Like in the mods Wireless Charging, Electric Vehicles.)

Also, I concur with the ideas in the posts above that lasers should pulse the beam. That is more or less how lasers can operate. The military got some hectic stuff. And having the impact points randomise would just be that extra icing on top that you guys are so well at.

Thanks for your time.

[Light]

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELIASTIC!?!?!?

Wait... what?

Well, its still not completely realistic. Correct me if Im wrong but in reality You would only see a laser point on the enemy but like this it looks way cooler

It's all a matter of wattage.



https://youtu.be/iVrJUbeuG44?t=37

[dgw]

Absolutely love them. Great work!

We believe that the new stand fits much better to the laser turret as it doesn't need any super heavy basing, and makes the two turrets more visually distinguishable.

I get that I really do. More elegant basing totally fits laser turrets. However,... it's kinda weird that in-game logic means lighter basing = 5 times more HP compared to gun turret.

Well, gun turrets take only copper and iron plates to build, while laser turrets take steel plates as a structural component. It makes sense that they could be more spindly but stronger to me.

This is an interesting article about software bugs: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose- ... his-anyway
Some of it is about detecting bad memory and hardware faults.

I'm reading this article right now, vaguely remembering reading it maybe 3-4 years ago. My favorite phrase in the post is "Graphics cards are an inexpensive system upgrade".

[Tekky]

This is the first Factorio Friday Facts after Kovarex and Twinsen have returned from the gaming convention in Taiwan. I would have expected that the team's experiences at the gaming convention would have been mentioned in the FFF. Or was it so bad that nobody wants to talk about it?

I really like it that the FFF mentiones that the compression problems are supposed to get fixed before 0.16 is declared stable.

[Tricorius]

This is the first Factorio Friday Facts after Kovarex and Twinsen have returned from the gaming convention in Taiwan. I would have expected that the team's experiences at the gaming convention would have been mentioned in the FFF. Or was it so bad that nobody wants to talk about it?

I was hoping to hear more about this as well. As grumpy as I can be about my bots, I absolutely love this game. It is the game I’d love to make if I had any kind of game development skill. My coding skill is, sadly, wasted on enterprise business software.

But I want Wube to have all the money.

I expect that the convention went well, but they were probably too tired to write much up. Hopefully we’ll hear more in the near future.

[posila]

My favorite phrase in the post is "Graphics cards are an inexpensive system upgrade".

Ha ha, yeah On the other hand, any gamer has now chance to put their GPU to work to pay for itself

This is the first Factorio Friday Facts after Kovarex and Twinsen have returned from the gaming convention in Taiwan. I would have expected that the team's experiences at the gaming convention would have been mentioned in the FFF. Or was it so bad that nobody wants to talk about it?

They returned on Friday afternoon and were not keen on sharing their experiences right away

[Drury]

My favorite phrase in the post is "Graphics cards are an inexpensive system upgrade".

Ha ha, yeah On the other hand, any gamer has now chance to put their GPU to work to pay for itself

This is the first Factorio Friday Facts after Kovarex and Twinsen have returned from the gaming convention in Taiwan. I would have expected that the team's experiences at the gaming convention would have been mentioned in the FFF. Or was it so bad that nobody wants to talk about it?

They returned on Friday afternoon and were not keen on sharing their experiences right away

Hold on, does that mean kovarex was fixing splitter bugs while still in Taiwan?

[posila]

Hold on, does that mean kovarex was fixing splitter bugs while still in Taiwan?

Yes