Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[SuperSandro2000]

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?

Why should they?
Don't be such a game that wipes everything on launch. Kills a bunch of long term player.

[Philip017]

oh i like this FFF, simplicity. i never really wrapped my head around the shear amount of math this game can involve. i just set it up and watched it work, changed some things, watched it a bit longer, until i found something that worked well and i was happy with. in multiplayer i seen so many different creative things, and i take some of that knowledge back with me and play with it some more. meet a few friends that are really astounding at doing the math in this game and see just how their designs work, and make my own changes. some of the things i could have learned early on made learning them later feel like "now how did i not know that sooner?" not that i didn't have plenty of fun back then, it turned into that much more fun.

i totally get now why assembly machines cant make but certain items, but back then i was annoyed. so having to not have to research automation 2 to get assemblers to make electronic circuits and inserters seems like a good change to me! but yeah it'll need some tweaking of the lazy bastard achievement if you ask me, i know when i did it i had 10 crafts to spare.

also i never understood the resistances, i didn't ever bother with the flame thrower after the first time i killed myself with it, yeah you have made it better but then it got hit with the nerf hammer and was never the same. but still use grenades to clear trees, good use for them early game, once i have robots i let them chop them all down and feed the wood to my boilers.

speaking of which i never understood the efficiency ratings, so glad to see that gone, so also gone from cars/locomotives too i guess. efficiency is still useful in mods probably.

don't understand the variation 7 that uranium has however, some clarification? EDIT: i see it's debugging information, might want to adjust that screen shot. you are probably going to get this question alot

also mineing could be further simplified by dropping the 200% mining time and adjust the miners to speed 1, after all 0.5 x 200% = 100% - just a thought.

i totally get the need for 13.33 26.66 and 30 items per second at 60 fps, but alot of people do have variable refresh rate monitors and not all screens are locked at 60 fps, perhaps some magic behind the scenes can allow fps to be independent of ups. i know it probably wont be easy, but something to think about and see if it is even possible. this is especially true when useing modded belts that run at much faster speeds than vanilla. even to the point that items appear to go backwards on the belts.

thanks again!

[irbork]

One more thing to stream line would be the throughput of belt types to 15-30-45 by adding a little more compression on the belts. I saw somewhere very compelling and in depth analysis on this subject.

[Goose]

Will assembler 1's have the ability to use fluids in crafting?

[Reika]

I really do not want to see mining power and ore hardness removed. That mechanic of "better tiers of drill for harder ores" is a big one in Bob and Angel mods. Without it, you can mine tungsten from the beginning of the game.

Also, regarding resistances: Please tell me that new types can still be modded in. If not, there will be no way to add all the new ammo and weapon effects that many combat and enemy mods rely on, including things like piercing and radiation. Things like new "nothing has any resistance to this" damage types or enemies that can only be killed with a specific ammo type.

[jona5]

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.

the problem is temporal aliasing not spatial aliasing.

i worked in a video effects company and we created endtitles for movies: here you can have super-smooth anti-aliased fonts, but if you do a roll title with a speed not divisiable by 1 pixel/frame the characters seem to change shape when rolling over the screen.

i guess the kovarex talks about the same effect with items on the belts.

[LuxSublima]

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).

I think this is going too far.

The ability to equip mk 2 power armor is one of the best individual feelings of accomplishment in the game, because of all the power and options that come with it. If it just automatically has its effect the instant you research the tech, the feeling of reward won't be as visceral. The ability to kit it out with different setups is also incredibly satisfying. If you have multiple suits of armor you can have them set up for different purposes - for example I usually have three sets: one for max walking speed, one for max construction bots, and one for combat.

I find the choices they made about the different sizes of equipment and the armor's capacity very good and rewarding.

Sure the game is mainly about factory building, but its also about being a person stranded on an alien planet actually having to survive and make that factory. As a person, you have to equip stuff, and it feels more real if there are some limitations to it. If you're going to remove ALL the sense of being a person in the game, why have a player at all? Then it just becomes SimFactory instead of Factorio. There needs to be some sense of actually being a person in the game or a huge part of the feeling of the game is lost.

[OvermindDL1]

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

Yeah this is weird here, I always found the efficiency loss going to electricity to be a great balancing measure, especially early game, and in my considerations to go to electric smelters (which I only did once I started filling them with modules since they are the same speed as steel but module-less and were originally much less 'fuel' efficient due to the power loss from electric conversion).

[Xheotris]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

[quyxkh]

The only real downside is, that the achievement "lazy bastard" will be much less of a puzzle

Taking puzzles out of the game is in aid of what goal, exactly? Factorio gets its lasting value from the quality of its design puzzles. The rewards for solving them are wonderful, the design aesthetic, the music, the underlying setup, it's all truly a work of art, but nobody'd want to say that's its value. The story's enough to help the willing suspend disbelief, the aesthetic's enough to make the time spent pleasing and afford opportunities for people to appreciate y'all's attention to detail, but the game is about design puzzles. Saying ~the only real downside is we're taking design puzzles out~ strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[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).

I think this is going too far.

The ability to equip mk 2 power armor is one of the best individual feelings of accomplishment in the game, because of all the power and options that come with it. If it just automatically has its effect the instant you research the tech, the feeling of reward won't be as visceral. The ability to kit it out with different setups is also incredibly satisfying. If you have multiple suits of armor you can have them set up for different purposes - for example I usually have three sets: one for max walking speed, one for max construction bots, and one for combat.

I find the choices they made about the different sizes of equipment and the armor's capacity very good and rewarding.

Sure the game is mainly about factory building, but its also about being a person stranded on an alien planet actually having to survive and make that factory. As a person, you have to equip stuff, and it feels more real if there are some limitations to it. If you're going to remove ALL the sense of being a person in the game, why have a player at all? Then it just becomes SimFactory instead of Factorio. There needs to be some sense of actually being a person in the game or a huge part of the feeling of the game is lost.

I didn't mean to take away mk2, but instead of making the armor expensive, the research would be expensive, it's not like the average player sets up an assembly line to produce mk2s. I don't mean to take away the grid either, it'd still be there and you could still deck it out, you just wouldn't have to put your old armor into a wooden box and shoot it. As for the setups, the armor could provide different loadout slots, much like in various RPGs. Instead of equipping a different armor you'd select a different loadout in the UI.

[Jelmergu]

Why though not change the boiler energy display from MW to MJ. That way it is clear when you talk about fuel(MJ) and when talking about electricity. I think that, if I didn't know better, I would see 'energy consumption' using a Watt value and think it needs electricity.

[MrGrim]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

Ya, most of the changes are fairly legit for the vanilla game, but this one will reduce the relevance of steel furnaces considerably. In the early mid game upgrading to them and sticking with them for as long as possible rather than upgrading your power and deploying electric furnaces was a nice option for people paying close enough attention to see the efficiency gains. With this, steel furnace efficiency is cut in half, and the benefit to keeping them around is eliminated. That's too bad.

[Therax]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

Could this be maintained by doubling the energy consumption of electric furnaces and keeping their crafting speed?

[Durabys]

@bilka
Will you preserve all these internal mechanics you are removing in the base code for modders to use? E.g. the pickaxe slot and pickaxes in general and mining efficiency? Those are core part of Bob's and Angel's mods.

[irbork]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

Could this be maintained by doubling the energy consumption of electric furnaces and keeping their crafting speed?

This won't do since it will mostly affect the late game when you are using solar or nuclear power. I would rather lower the energy consumption of steel furnace.

[VinWij]

The removal of the pickaxe was actually something I once wrote a suggestion about, because it is indeed really minecrafty and does not fit the rest of the game. However, in light of my suggestion I feel that just removing it might be a missed oppertunity. I once suggested replacing it by something much more useful and allow more player interaction with the factory. Because now all interaction basically involves building something and that's it. All interaction quickly turns into how many materials you pump into the base. Maybe you upgrade some assemblers sometime or change the boards in it, but other than that a factory is usually rather static.

As the oppertunity is here, allow me to point to my suggestion again. It only received a single comment in the days, and I hope it deserves more now that the devs are finally looking at the pickaxe.

Pickaxe -> Matter Manipulator: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=54283

[Bilka]

@bilka
Will you preserve all these internal mechanics you are removing in the base code for modders to use? E.g. the pickaxe slot and pickaxes in general and mining efficiency? Those are core part of Bob's and Angel's mods.

As the FFF states

[W]e completely removed mining tools from the game. [...] So the decision is that the whole hardness and mining power mechanics was removed.

So, the internal mechanics for these two things were removed and mods cannot bring them back.

[promaty]

The greatest simplification would be rounded numbers for belt throughput. Calculating it manually is just so unnecessary complex right now with all those decimals... I'm sure some trick can be done on the graphics side regarding pixel/tick like putting items closer together, etc. This is a major game mechanic, priority should not be on "smooth looks".

[Xheotris]

I love all of these, except the fuel efficiency. It made the choice between steel and electric furnaces an interesting and viable one. If you had petrochemical based power, then steel furnaces were in some cases better than electric, while electric becomes fully superior in solar/nuclear builds.

Furnaces and furnace efficiency are a core part of the game, and absolutely central to the decision making process when building. I think it was one step too far.

Could this be maintained by doubling the energy consumption of electric furnaces and keeping their crafting speed?

This won't do since it will mostly affect the late game when you are using solar or nuclear power. I would rather lower the energy consumption of steel furnace.

Eh, between nerfing electric and buffing steel, I would be fine either way. All I care about is that the efficiency of steel furnaces being higher was a motivating factor through the mid-game, before you reach mass-modules.