Friday Facts #252 - Sound design & Map editor

[gallomimia]

Val: Thanks very much for all you'll be doing to this game! I believe I can speak for all of the players (except maybe the deaf ones) that brainstorming real experiences into the choices you make about sound design will make it amazing!

Albert: Your FFF's have been awesome. Really enjoy seeing your commentary, and upcomming work. The new spawners look excellent, but they don't seem to integrate with the landscape very well. Perhaps some additional sprites with a sort of "creep" spreading out around the base, to allow it to fade into the various tiles.

Regarding the map editor. Rseding wins again! Of course. The addons and changes to bring map editor back into the spotlight are amazing, insightful, visionary, and everything I've come to expect from Rseding.

Meeting the devs in open chat channels online, and reading this development blog have done things for me-and-this-game that no other company has ever done. Thank you all! Keep being awesome.

[factoriouzr]

This is all amazing!

I love the high quality biter and base textures shown so far, the sound improvements and love that the biters are being shown some love.

PLEASE SHOW MORE LOVE TO THE BITERS. Please make them more interesting and harder. Make more types, make more interesting behaviours, make boss type byters at bigger bases, better biter AI. Please let us choose at some level to enable these new behaviours for biters (even just a difficulty slider) in case some players don't want harder biters.

I also love the map editor. I love all the changes to it, that it works seamlessly in single player and multiplayer. I love that I can do anything with it and it's not restricted. I completely agree, that it shouldn't be restricted. I love being able to copy/paste between maps.

All great stuff guys, but please, improve biters in the other ways I mentioned above as well. They are a key part of the game for me. I love the survival and challenge aspect they add, but they just aren't hard enough or interesting enough yet.

[HurkWurk]

wish list for the map editor:

1. separate ground entities from things on top, so i can paint an area of ground without wiping out everything on top.
2. get the trees together into a category so i can remove just trees without having to select 20 types. (or having to switch to bulk erase)
3. control/set game time past. so that you can reset biter progression, pollution, etc. IE the ability to make a map using the editor, then reset everything to time zero, so that when people start playing the map, they arent already deep into progression. (this allows me to create maps with some pre-staged production, etc, then let players take over). alternatively, i could run the "clock" so the game is ~4 hours old, forcing the players to deal with biter encroachment, etc.
4. set a starting loadout for players per map.
5. unlock specific techs. (also with or without allowing them to progress from that point)
6. set factories to produce things that the player cannot research, so that they have to protect those factories and cannot move them without losing that production capability. I understand smelting isnt really a possibility here in vanilla, since you dont "set" what a smelter makes, but at least with mods i could.
7. highlight the corners of buildings like you do when overlapping, for all objects close to where im placing an object (I want this for the normal game too, makes lining things up a lot easier)
8. i think your live editor already fixes the issues with power grid and gun ranges not showing properly. but just in case... these should always show when placing relevant objects. (and they should be togglable to always show, no matter what you are building)
9. measuring tools. This like, "lay down a 40x40 grid" and have it visible while in the editor, but not when out of the editor... again, to help line things up. also things like fire a ray from here to infinite, so i can tell distance from a starting point without having to count it out. (or what i normally do is paint an area of grass 1000x1000 then start sub dividing with wood on corners of blocks)
10. copy and paste are awesome, but look how blueprints work too... allowing blueprints to be used while in the editor without resource requirements would be freaking awesome. and look at tools like bluebuild and others that allow you to upgrade/downgrade items in blueprints so that i can take something that works at end game and scale it back to early game and paste without having to re-create it.
11. snap to grid painting for items like trees. rather than just the current random spray pattern.

[Hayertjez]

Because of this fridayfact, I thought it was a good idea to use the Map editor to try and see how I works to create a set of (Modular railway) blueprints. But Apperantly I can't create blueprints from the editor itself
Also the Train Layout system did not seem to work the same way, for example the "ghosting path" is not available. And why are rail(chain) signals not automatically connected the same way as in the normal game? Keep rotating every rail and signal is verry frustrating and time consuming. There is definiately room for improvement.
Everytime I read these Friday Fact I am verry happy with this game and development of the game. I can feel the attentions this game gets from its developers. Keep up the good work!

[cpy]

If only we had cool reaload sound for guns and reload mechanics.

[JackGruff]

The nests need to go through a growth phase, not just pop up. I imagine it would be cool to make it that the large biters/behemoths embed themselves in the ground and slowly become the building, sacrificing their biomass.

[mrvn]

The nests need to go through a growth phase, not just pop up. I imagine it would be cool to make it that the large biters/behemoths embed themselves in the ground and slowly become the building, sacrificing their biomass.

That could also mean that there is a delay between the nest starting to grow and it spawning. If you watch your radar carefully you could race out there and kill the nest before it spawns.

[walterwoj]

one of the main things the editor of yore was missing is the ability to generate LESS random maps. It's a pain to generate a map with everything beautifully random (you really do a good job of that by the way) so that I can blank out the whole map to start from scratch. Being able to cut and paste within a map would be awesome too.

[T-A-R]

What the heck are those?!

It seems a legit spawner. You know where babies are from right;)

[xARCHONx]

Wonderful article.
With regards to the editor, I'm really hoping you can work on the surfaces feature so modders can better make use of it in future.
Even in Vanilla Editor, I have trouble switching, or even starting on the new surface with I added.

[foodfactorio]

hi i like the sound and map editor ideas.

for the map editor:
i think allowing the player to do unrestricted things, is the way to go, and it will be really cool to be able to pause the game, draw a little ore patch "in a live game" and un-pause (even without pausing the game)

personally i would not use it for cheating, but this would be a great way of trying out a new item of mod recipe, without having to quit the current game and launch another creative mode, for example the vortik Deep Mining patches which can also appear when you clear out an existing ore patch.. not sure how they work, just draw one in and add the entity needed to try mining it, without needing to leave the current game - later on you can research and build them properly, but this way it could let us try things out too.

in multiplayer games, sometimes you need just 1 tiny square patch of a certain ore, to be able to unlock some reasearch that is halting the game progress, but because it is really far away behind lots of biters, it would take several hours to fight through, and you might only have an hour or 2 with all players available before some people need to do other stuff, so being able to draw it into the live game, will really help the game move along a bit, (especially in modded games where there is a lot of stuff to make or research).

also, imagine how cool it would be in a solo game, (using angel bob yuoki and other mods), to draw a little stone ore patch because they do look cool, (but they are removed in angel mods), so we can put a miner on it, even if some players have been drowning in crushed stone)

edit: pyCoal mods Love stone

[eradicator]

On the subject of sound design i just realized that most of the things you do in factorio have no sound at all:

• Rotating an entity.
• Throwing a capsule.
• Opening most machines. Assemblers and furnaces have sound, but inserters, combinators, drills, power poles, etcpp do not.
• Catching a fish.
• Taking damage. Should be different for with and without shield.
• Boarding a train.

And probably many more.

[Stevepunk]

Btw on the provided screenshot with new spawners (which look nice to me) biters look just too merged with surroundings so I can barely see them at all. They definitely need more color and contrast added to them.

Wow, I didn't even see them there!