Friday Facts #284 - 0.17 experimental

[meganothing]

Hahahaha, well maybe... I understand you have to limit the features and options or this becomes a bit wild. It may be practical to redirect any train but this may lead to miss-clicks and diverting trains into places there is no return or there is some problem. Calling any train to a point... i can see the problems so that is a bit more complex in my opinion. But when you are already on a train... if you ctrl-click the map in a rail 99.9% you want to go there in that train, no possible mistakes^^.
I use the feature to send other trains (that i'm not into) to locations of course, but in that case i don't mind finding the train I want to send (normally in that cases you send a train with something to some place, so you need to confirm that the train has the required cargo, etc). Is there a use case I'm missing here?
Thank you for the feedback and nice ideas.

Well, I always have a train in my inventory for the case that I'm somewhere far from base and need a train home, but it needs too many clicks to set down the train, board it, fill some fuel into it and set a destination. 10 clicks minimum for an operation I do 10 times or more an evening.
I also sometimes use any train I find and send it to my position. Finding a train that isn't just on the other side of the map and isn't on a different train network takes a little time, finding my spot again as well. Also I need to do the "enter train menue, find location and ctrl-click on it" twice for that to work. Again more micro-mangement clicks than strictly necessary.

Do you make train networks where you can send a train into a sub-network where no way goes back? What's the use case there to connect them at all? Sure, if I stand near an incomplete track the train might have to be driven out backwards, but I should know 99,9% of the time if a track is incomplete.

IF ctrl-click is already used for other features in the normal view (can't check atm) then yes, that would be a possible source of errors. But changing the keys to access this feature could be changed as well.

[BlueTemplar]

I saw a lot of people complaining about the scaling for biter attacks, why not make the intensity on a slider? In fact we could have two different preset sets - one for terrain types, and one for difficulty that scales the biter:researched tech ratio, size of biter camps, etc. Sounds like the current .17 settings are more suited to "hard mode" and not so much casual play. Some people / new people will want a bit of challenge while still being able to play casually and make mistakes.

You might be confusing the discussion about the Introduction Campaign and Freeplay ? Freeplay has a lot of settings like that already...

[cid0rz]

Hahahaha, well maybe... I understand you have to limit the features and options or this becomes a bit wild. It may be practical to redirect any train but this may lead to miss-clicks and diverting trains into places there is no return or there is some problem. Calling any train to a point... i can see the problems so that is a bit more complex in my opinion. But when you are already on a train... if you ctrl-click the map in a rail 99.9% you want to go there in that train, no possible mistakes^^.
I use the feature to send other trains (that i'm not into) to locations of course, but in that case i don't mind finding the train I want to send (normally in that cases you send a train with something to some place, so you need to confirm that the train has the required cargo, etc). Is there a use case I'm missing here?
Thank you for the feedback and nice ideas.

Do you make train networks where you can send a train into a sub-network where no way goes back? What's the use case there to connect them at all? Sure, if I stand near an incomplete track the train might have to be driven out backwards, but I should know 99,9% of the time if a track is incomplete.

IF ctrl-click is already used for other features in the normal view (can't check atm) then yes, that would be a possible source of errors. But changing the keys to access this feature could be changed as well.

Sometimes I do different rail networks and things can get messed up if a 4 wagon train goes into 2 wagon network or some are 2ways (trains are reversible with locos both sides) networks and others are one way so I can think on many cases where choosing a random near train can be problematic. I can see also you may click twice for example and send two trains so as an idea I think its nice to call trains randomly but i see some complicated issues my original suggestion lack. I'll try to think how could be implemented to call "random" trains in a clean way...Cheers!

[WolfFS]

Is the new fluid system already included in 0.17.8?

In particular I'm missing the tooltip information that was described in fff-274. The lack of flow rate information in the current build makes it difficult to properly plan the fluid logistics. There is the wiki of course - https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system, but it seems wrong that there is no basic fluid flow information within the game itself. The number 0-100 for the pipe content is rather unhelpful, if there is absolutely no indication how to really interpret that number.

[Lonami]

It's "middle mouse click" but I don't think it teaches you that in the tutorial

Oh damn, thanks. I wouldn't have ever thought about that. But I've tried all combinations of Shift, Alt, Ctrl and left/right mouse buttons

in fact it doesn't teach any of the hotbar functionality at all

Indeed, and I think they really should, both for new players and veterans, because right now it works quite differently from what it used to be.

[Lonami]

• All hover graphics look like Photoshop Default Layer Glow Effect (cheap)

Not sure what those look like, but I'm quite pleased with the new UI.

• UI Elements look like they are made for touch devices (big, bulky buttons)

Nothing wrong with this. Bigger buttons = easier to click. There's no need to make everything tiny so it looks pretty (or not), usability is important.

[BlueTemplar]

Well, the UI scale seems to be generally much smaller than in 0.16... so it's increasing the UI scale to the same text size than before that makes for extra-large buttons ?

Is the new fluid system already included in 0.17.8?

In particular I'm missing the tooltip information that was described in fff-274. The lack of flow rate information in the current build makes it difficult to properly plan the fluid logistics. There is the wiki of course - https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system, but it seems wrong that there is no basic fluid flow information within the game itself. The number 0-100 for the pipe content is rather unhelpful, if there is absolutely no indication how to really interpret that number.

Not entirely. Though the algorithm seem to not have changed much yet, so that maximum flow / pipe length table might still be accurate ?

[MageKing17]

Is the new fluid system already included in 0.17.8?

In particular I'm missing the tooltip information that was described in fff-274. The lack of flow rate information in the current build makes it difficult to properly plan the fluid logistics. There is the wiki of course - https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system, but it seems wrong that there is no basic fluid flow information within the game itself. The number 0-100 for the pipe content is rather unhelpful, if there is absolutely no indication how to really interpret that number.

See FFF #283 - Prepare to Launch:

We were testing the algorithm, and there was a lot of back and forth, but the time was running by and there were some problems not that easy to fix. To prevent things from getting broken in a ways we couldn't anticipate and not to potentially delay the release any further, we decided to split the change.

So the fluid mixing prevention and fluid update optimisations are in 0.17, but the new algorithm was put aside for further research.

[Lonami]

Yay, I completed the introduction! (With +2k kills...)

intro-stats.jpg (11.77 KiB) Viewed 4610 times

[BlueTemplar]

Congratulations !

[thereaverofdarkness]

I love the new belt/toolbar which does not store items, but the way it works is confusing and irritating. I can no longer left-click to remove an icon, in fact I tried a wide variety of key combos to remove icons from the toolbar, and eventually gave up, treating it as if it couldn't be done. I later discovered I could middle-click to remove them, but that was among the last things I would have tried.

Also, when I put an entity in the toolbar, I have to click three times to get it to go off my cursor. The first click puts it on the toolbar but leaves it on the cursor. The second click selects the toolbar icon and loads it onto the cursor. It is the third click which finally puts it away. I think the first click to place it on the toolbar should also remove it from the cursor, not only because that's how the toolbar used to work, but also because most of the times I am placing an entity on the toolbar, I am not also trying to put it on my cursor.