Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-266

Another thing that might help is to have a clear list of what is and is not still moddable, and perhaps a justification (whether it's accepted or not) for removing what you did from the engine. Then people wouldn't need to speculate and extrapolate.

I don't know reasoning beyond what was written in FFF

• Pickaxe - tool slot and mining-tool prototype removed from engine (there is dummy mining-tool for purpose of migration of old saves)
• Burner efficiency - no engine change, base mod was changed so it always uses efficiency = 1
• Hardness, Mining power, Mining speed & Mining time - mining speed calculation overhauled in the engine; mining_hardness and mining_power removed, only mining_time and mining_speed are used to calculate final mining speed. If you want to constrain some resources to be minable only by higher tier of drills, use resource_categories (see pumpjack definition in base mod). Restricting player from mining non-resource entity is not possible at the moment. It's also not possible to temporarily prevent player from mining resource entities (player can either mine a resource from start - but maybe super slow, or not able to mine it at all).
• Resistances/Damage types - no engine change, mods can add more damage types if they need to
• Assembling machine ingredient limit - minor engine change = AssemblingMachinePrototype::ingredient_count is now optional and defaults to 255, everything else were changes in base mod

[RocketManChronicles]

Another great post from the great devs behind this game... just keep up the good work! Thank you for thousands of hours of fun and still yet more to come. The streamlining makes much more sense now.

[Yehn]

I'm very glad to hear about the change to assembly machines. I've always felt like I had to rush blue assemblers - despite their expensive early game cost - because greys just can't make too many basic recipes.

Now I'll be able to delay upgrading to blues a bit and focus more on automating early game recipes instead of dumping all my resources into those ASAP. (Also - yay! we'l be able to automate refinery production immediately)

[IronCartographer]

No loss of efficiency from switching to electric smelting while still using boiler-driven steam power? Interesting.

Will the melee mechanic still exist? Does the damage scale with the new steel-axe replacement tech?

[rcbrito91]

So it seems, by what we could read from this FFF, that the wait will be long for the 0.17...

It is a dubious sentiment: A part of me wants to play the new aditions, the other wants to wait for more incredible alterations to the base game

This alterations seems to be so substantial that i can't even play 0.16 anymore... The harder part is to find the pacience to wait..

But, keep up the good work!

[Vandroiy]

Yes! This is a great mindset! Cut the excess features and complexity, so the good parts can shine!

This is something so many designers don't understand, leading to all these zombie games that drown in their own featuritis.

Thumbs up!

[Pizzagod]

Weapons and armor behave much the same as pickaxes, you craft them once and keep them equipped forever. Maybe you should get rid of equipment entirely, simply upgrade the base armor and unlock new weapons without the need to equip them (what's the point of limiting it to three anyway?). While you're at it you could consume ammunition from the inventory directly and remove the tool box on the bottom right entirely, or maybe replace it with an ammo indicator (rather than info on the current stack only).

[antipin00]

On the topic of eliminating unnecessary complexity - there was a proposal on reddit to round belt throughputs to 15/30/45 (link).
What do you think about it?

[kovarex]

On the topic of eliminating unnecessary complexity - there was a proposal on reddit to round belt throughputs to 15/30/45 (link).
What do you think about it?

We can't do that easily actually. The movement of items on belts is 1 pixel per tick, and if you change it to something else than the multiplication of it, the movement will look choppy.

[utoxin]

On the topic of eliminating unnecessary complexity - there was a proposal on reddit to round belt throughputs to 15/30/45 (link).
What do you think about it?

We can't do that easily actually. The movement of items on belts is 1 pixel per tick, and if you change it to something else than the multiplication of it, the movement will look choppy.

The proposal didn't actually suggest changing the movement speed. It suggested packing the icons on the belt slightly closer together, so that the average density was 12.5% higher, resulting in higher throughput at the same movement speed.

[H8UL]

All the changes look good to me!

Which of these changes are to the core game engine itself, and which are in the base mod only?

Edit: seems like too many of these changes aren't moddable back in. I think that is a waste of code you already got into a great state and a big problem for big mods.

[Oktokolo]

We can't do that easily actually. The movement of items on belts is 1 pixel per tick, and if you change it to something else than the multiplication of it, the movement will look choppy.

There is no need to do full-pixel steps as GPUs are fine with rendering stuff that is not aligned to a full-pixel grid. Use floats for sprite coordinates (GPUs expect floats anyway) and support some cheap antialiasing mode, so the result always looks smooth.

[deer_buster]

I'm very glad to hear about the change to assembly machines. I've always felt like I had to rush blue assemblers - despite their expensive early game cost - because greys just can't make too many basic recipes.

Now I'll be able to delay upgrading to blues a bit and focus more on automating early game recipes instead of dumping all my resources into those ASAP. (Also - yay! we'l be able to automate refinery production immediately)

This....by all means, this

[irbork]

R.I.P. TeamSteelAxe
R.I.P. "Praise the Steelaxe!"

[SuperSandro2000]

Do you keep all the options for mods? Please ...

For removing picks:
How do you want to lock progression in mods?
I mean add another lab that you can only feed materials... Wow now we really advanced that.

Removing resistances is fine. No one cared about them anyway.

Removing mining power removes another possibility for mods to make drills that don't mine at a constant rate.

[Zaflis]

What does the "Variation" line mean in ore tooltip? If it's something like number of sprites, i don't think player needs to know.

[Bilka]

What does the "Variation" line mean in ore tooltip? If it's something like number of sprites, i don't think player needs to know.

It's debug only and not shown to the player :)

[ThorsDragon]

awesome changes!!!

[caramelwhistle]

Assembling machine ingredient limit removal

The idea behind this mechanic was that better assembling machines can use more complex recipes. But the reality is, that there is not really a clear connection between the number of ingredients and the complexity of the recipe. Since it was yet another thing that had to be explained somehow, we decided to just remove it. The only real downside is, that the achievement "lazy bastard" will be much less of a puzzle, but we still consider it to be worth it.

Oh well, as least having pushed myself to get that achievement this last week I can hold my head high I did it the slightly harder way...

Now will I manage to do "There is no spoon" before 0.17 too, we'll see.

[torham]

Yet more quality of life. The game is going to be polished so much, its gonna have a hole in it

Lazy bastard is going to be a breeze now. I would consider lowering the craft count to reflect these changes.

Have you considered wiping the achievement stats on 1.0 launch?