Friday Facts #269 - Roadmap update & Transport belt perspective

[factoriouzr]

Is there any way you could release a beta right before Christmas?
I have very little time to play, but will have some times between Christmas and New Year.

Since we expect to spend some time with bugfixing right after the release (as usual), we had to avoid releasing before christmas, as it is expected that people don't work that much at that time usually.

Please read my previous post in this thread. Basically I suggested releasing what you have now, either in November or early to mid Dec and only fixing critical bugs. If you release now with what you have done already, you have more time to test it and fix bugs. Not everything has to be in this next release.

[factoriouzr]

Will the temporary train stop (i.e. train hijacking) feature mentioned in Factorio Friday Facts #212 be available in 0.17 or 0.18?

Yes, it is still part of the plan.

This didn't answer the question

[factoriouzr]

oh great, something else I have to re-write for 0.17

Do you mean graphics for belts?

[factoriouzr]

But please don't forget the Spidertron! I've wanted to have one ever since I saw it in the FFF #120.

I don't think that a Spidertron would fit well into Factorio.

Although I like the idea of being able to traverse the map without obstacles, I believe that a jetpack or a helicopter would be more appropriate than a Spidertron. This is already being discussed in the Spidertron news thread, so it would not be appropriate to duplicate this discussion here.

However, I have nothing against the Spidertron being implemented as an optional mod.

Why not have all of them

[Muppet9010]

these look good, hard to pick one over the other, although the slopped one is more immediately obvious as to its purpose.

Very excited to see the progress on the updated belt graphics and read about 0.17 pretty much right around the corner. Understandably you want to take the holidays off this time before having to deal with the tsunami of bug reports. Can hardly wait!!!!

Belt Stopper
Reading about how others also noted the missing stopper at the end of belts I realised this was something that would be great to implement. While you are working on these changes to the belt graphics it would be awesome (and be much more believable) seeing something at the end of a belt stop items from falling off. Please consider!

Made some concept mock ups to demonstrate...

[YourBringerOfRain]

Why have the underneathie spirt change when it recognizes side loading and instead just make the spirit smaller on the bottom so that it only covers up 1/2 of the square tile they're in to begin with?

Personally, I LOVE the new underneathie look but the fact that the design changes when sideloading just seems wrong to me. If the underneathies already had the gap in their original design I think it would not only look better but would also fit the overall theme of Factorio and lead new players to see it and think "I wonder why that's there? I wonder if there's space for one item to go in but not the other?"

And as another user mentioned, add bumpers to the end of belts to visually show that items stop at the end of the belt and don't just fall off in a big pile

[Unknow0059]

This is really awesome. I never thought i would ever see this implemented because it was such a tiny thing.

[Creepopolous]

How would sideloading work visually now? Why would a lane be feeding a lower belt continuously but the other one is waiting patiently for that belt to clear up, without an obvious barrier? The two solutions to that would be some sort of automated barrier that lowers when the lane is accessible, or spilling all over the lower belt. The first one is my preference.

[FasterJump]

1) Happy to see your great work about belt perspective + belt endings spites + new HD res. Can't wait to see how these (massives?) new belts renders ingame, sounds promising!

2) Fluid optimisations: so you have a work in progress about this? Would be nice to get few clues about the approach you chose.

3) New underground belts : Very nice. But wait... would you, by any chance... *scrolling down* YES YOU DID! ALLELUIA!!
Now the art doesn't "glitch" anymore and reflects this feature correctly.
Old threads about this:
Historic post: Make Underground Belt Magic More Visible
Thread with a suggestion for a side-loading hole: About underground belt trick art

[xng]

I'm really happy to see you're at least beginning to think of progressing the development now, it's been a mess of new feature ideas and experimental playing around for almost a year now. Thank you for listening to us at last.

[irbork]

I guess that now when belts ends go over the the next tile we will return to letting inserters pick up items from the tile where belt is not physically placed but items are pushed onto it

[Nova]

I guess that now when belts ends go over the the next tile we will return to letting inserters pick up items from the tile where belt is not physically placed but items are pushed onto it

No, I don't think so. That was a stupid property and hopefully removed forever. ^^

I'm really happy to see you're at least beginning to think of progressing the development now, it's been a mess of new feature ideas and experimental playing around for almost a year now. Thank you for listening to us at last.

Rushed development leads to bad games - I hope they take as much time as they need, I don't care for "mess of new feature ideas". ^^

[luc]

What about the spidertron?

[Drury]

What about the spidertron?

spidertron got cancelled in favor of much superior catron

ohbp9136uny11.jpg (138.7 KiB) Viewed 7195 times

[NoQ]

0.18 plan
It will become the final 1.0 version once it is stable. It will contain mainly:

• New tutorial
• New campaign
• Final mini tutorials

My memories of how developing game campaigns usually goes suggests that you should release a testable version of campaigns as early as possible; just one round of beta-testing might not be enough.

Campaigns are hard to make due to a lot of "race conditions" between different events: different bugs will appear depending on in which order does the player chose to do certain actions. Eg., the player runs around the biter colony to reach the next important area instead of killing it first or discovers nuclear weapons before discovering the fast inserter. And for most of these bugs the discussion will be like "Level 3 does not finish when I complete all the objectives!" - "OMG this is game-breaking, they need to immediately fix it!". These bugs are almost impossible to eliminate manually unless your levels are extremely simple: it takes a *lot* of people with different "play styles" to cover all of the campaign script execution paths. Also it's hard to gather a good reproducer for the bug because by looking at the save you usually can't easily figure out in what order did the events occur.

If you manage to auto-test for these bugs or make them easier to debug somehow, eg., come up with a fuzzer that produces events in random orders and sees if all assertions hold and the level finishes correctly, or somehow make sure that the order of events is recorded in the save, or come up with a good declarative API for describing levels that is not prone to such races, this might get easier.

[Nightinggale]

As much as I love the new belt graphics, I have to say I hate them to the point where they essentially makes the game unplayable for me. The issue is all the details. There is motion in one direction and motion in the opposite direction and then it's full of rotating stuff. Looking at all this "chaotic" belt movement gives me motion sickness

However the solution seems obvious: add a game option to freeze the belt animation and make it use a sprite, which will not be replaced. Sure it will not look at great as moving belts, particularly with items moving on the belt, but it's still better than being forced to quit playing due to getting motion sickness. I think this is the best solution I can think of because it will get the job done, no negative effects on the majority of people not experiencing motion sickness (like altering the sprites would have) and it seems like it would be the fastest solution to implement.

This brings up another interesting question: would freezing the belt sprites help with FPS issues? I assume it's not the major factor, but would it help maxed out GPUs gaining even just a few more FPS?

Speaking of motion sickness inducing factors in the game, the flashlight isn't good either. Would it be possible to make displayed daylight and solar panel sunlight be two different values? It would be nice to be able to have 24 hour sunlight, but the mod providing that provides 24 hour solar panels, which isn't what I'm aiming at. I'm using it, but I feel like it's cheating regarding solar power.

[layus]

Considering that making belts like that makes it hard to believe that you can cross them walking, and that they are much more complex to implement, why not make a burried version, where the belt would be a floor level, with nice borders showing that there is some iron bed and cogs and stuff below ?

That would solve a lot of issues, right ?

Something like this ? (for the borders, and elevation, not for the design itself of course).


or this ?


I cannot resist showing this one, as it look directly inspired from factorio .

[FasterJump]

Few thoughs about the new belt height

Am I the only one who feels weird about the angle on belts? I immediately looked at them and said "I can see too much of the side". [...]

Some of my thoughts if you'll have them regarding the belts:

• [*18 px] They do look to be too tall now. Inserters just shrunk. [...]
• The sideloading has to be even-leveled. Otherwise you could expect the items to be stacked on top of each other.

As much as I love the new belt graphics, I have to say I hate them to the point where they essentially makes the game unplayable for me. The issue is all the details. There is motion in one direction and motion in the opposite direction and then it's full of rotating stuff. Looking at all this "chaotic" belt movement gives me motion sickness

I agree that the belts looks too tall now. I suggest tweaking their "height" from 18 px to maybe 13-15 px. Showing the mechanical stuff inside the gap is nice, but I'm sure you can do it with less height: in this image, I removed 1 or 2 pixel lines of grey, raised up the center of the rotating wheels, and opened the gap between 2 wheels. In the end, the perspective looks less weird, and we still see the stuff moving inside.

new_belt_tweak.png (15.53 KiB) Viewed 7064 times

Also, the side-loading looks a bit strange. In your example, have you tried to make the vertical belt display over the horizontal ones? Like this:

side_loading_height.png (202.23 KiB) Viewed 7071 times

And about this reverse motion displaying under the belt (that gives motion thickness to some), I agree that it looks strange to see opposites directions moving at the same time. But maybe at lower zooms levels, we won't notice it? Wait and see...

[bobingabout]

oh great, something else I have to re-write for 0.17

Do you mean graphics for belts?

Yes

Very excited to see the progress on the updated belt graphics and read about 0.17 pretty much right around the corner. Understandably you want to take the holidays off this time before having to deal with the tsunami of bug reports. Can hardly wait!!!!

Belt Stopper
Reading about how others also noted the missing stopper at the end of belts I realised this was something that would be great to implement. While you are working on these changes to the belt graphics it would be awesome (and be much more believable) seeing something at the end of a belt stop items from falling off. Please consider!

Made some concept mock ups to demonstrate...

I have to agree with this, since items don't fall off the end of a belt, some kind of back-stop would be a good idea.

[nosports]

Albeit the gfx looks very good, i did not have any problem with the 'old'

But the cut out of the underground-belt to feed the sideloading looks very like : shit, i need to make a hot fix cut out into the panel
I would have found it more convincing when then undergound belt is only half the size of it tile so no special gfx needed and it is then clear at first view that it could be loaded ......

And for the 0.17 or 1.0 i just don't care.....
The game at it is is very good and i don't lack anything for the moment...