Friday Facts #288 - New remnants, More bugs

[5thHorseman]

1% of 1M = 10K players.

Not a figure for an accountant, 10 000 people who like your game.

Less than 0.1% of 1M = Less than 1K players. Out of a million.

Do you spend days/weeks/months fixing this for them, or spend that time fixing things that affect all 1M players?

Not a figure for an accountant, 1 000 000 people who like your game.

[DaemosDaen]

What do I think?
I think you guys need a beer. If that's not your thing. a box of cookies then.

Trying to talk the wife into letting me deliver these things in person, but she keeps complaining about stuff like costs and work and whatnot.

[BlueTemplar]

They appreciate other things too.

[bobucles]

What if, when a building reaches 25% health it breaks, not functional, shows as damaged, but can still be repaired with repair packs.

When it reaches 0% it is destroyed, and remnants are left as today.

It wouldn't be very useful. Most buildings already have the endurance of tissue paper, at least towards the late game. 25% of a stiff breeze is not very obstructive at all.

Biters have two primary ways of getting rid of obstacles. They smash/eat them or they melt them. Either method of destruction probably wouldn't leave too much behind.

[mrudat]

I would suggest something like GURPS has for damage; an item's hitpoints are how much damage you need to render it inoperable, but complete annihilation requires doing 10 times that (at least for humans, iirc).

Obviously this doesn't work for everything; a wall is valid so long as it exists; perhaps have the wall get shorter as it is damaged, allowing biters that are big enough to crawl over it (slower than an empty tile, but fast enough they're happy to climb over it to get at the turret that's actively trying to kill them), while smaller biters are blocked (and continue to damage the wall).

Perhaps have something similar for buildings in general; current HP renders the building non-working, but still an obstruction (effectively a very weak wall); if it's in the way, the biters will continue damaging it, but if not, they'll move on to other things instead (but possibly return later, as it existing offends them, but not as much as bright, noisy, smelly things that are still working).

There's also a threshold where you go from 'damaged but repairable' to 'throw it in the blast furnace' or eventually 'building, what building?'

Small power poles, for example become inoperable if you damage the cables, but wouldn't be beyond repair until the pole itself is broken (which would take significantly more effort). Medium and big power poles would remain repairable up until you end up with 'twisted lump of metal', rather then 'used to be a power pole'.

[Gatticas]

1% of 1M = 10K players.

Not a figure for an accountant, 10 000 people who like your game.

Didn't he say 0.1%?

Wouldn't that be 1k?

[Griffork]

1% of 1M = 10K players.

Not a figure for an accountant, 10 000 people who like your game.

Less than 0.1% of 1M = Less than 1K players. Out of a million.

Do you spend days/weeks/months fixing this for them, or spend that time fixing things that affect all 1M players?

Not a figure for an accountant, 1 000 000 people who like your game.

No,
001% of
1000000 is
0010000

or 10,000.
Dry Hairy Tree was correct.

[BlueTemplar]

Sigh,

the proportion of our player base which uses these languages (less than 0.1%)

less than 0.1% of about 2M = about 1‰ of 2 000 000 = about 2 000

In any case, it's indeed about the ratio than the total number...

[DanGio]

mmmh... if implemented, those remnants could be a really strong incentive to build atomic bomb

[5thHorseman]

1% of 1M = 10K players.

Not a figure for an accountant, 10 000 people who like your game.

Less than 0.1% of 1M = Less than 1K players. Out of a million.

Do you spend days/weeks/months fixing this for them, or spend that time fixing things that affect all 1M players?

Not a figure for an accountant, 1 000 000 people who like your game.

No,
001% of
1000000 is
0010000

or 10,000.
Dry Hairy Tree was correct.

No. He said 1% of 10M was 10k. That was incorrect.

My mistake was not checking his math.

I still stand behind my reasoning - which matches the reasoning of the developers.

[SpoonUnit]

Given the situation that some remnants can be really irritating - dead bugs everywhere been the most obvious one as shown earlier in a screenshot - perhaps a new bot could be added which has cleanup duties with its sphere of influence. Compilatron rubbish collectors running round the base cleaning up could be quite cute.

[AndrewIRL]

Things don't get destroyed that frequently
Things that are destroyed get repaired when the player notices them so don't remain visible long
Once bots come onto the scene stuff is repaired off screen

Not worth any effort in designing custom remnant buildings, especially not multiple variants. Stick to a procedural (generic) method for remnants and focus your design efforts elsewhere.

[Mike5000]

Not worth any effort in designing custom remnant buildings, especially not multiple variants. Stick to a procedural (generic) method for remnants and focus your design efforts elsewhere.

This.

There's no need for new graphics and HD graphics unless maybe for advertising. We don't zoom in except maybe when editing rail junctions. We zoom out. We want ever larger blueprints and ever more performance.

And better control of vanilla trains.

[shadoworld56]

I'm a bit worried about more complex remnats. I think they might add to the overall overhead of ram usage when loading factorio, which isn't a problem in vanilla but I could see being more of an issue in heavly modded games. I like the look of them but I think they need to be togglable.

[harvald]

I think remnant should have collision box and be an item like building with it's own strength. Then it could be destroyed to nothing.
Ruins can beautifully fit into campaign with rebuilding of old, abandoned factory. It is also opportunity to gather resources from them, so it can open a whole new game mode - scavenger.

[Koub]

I'd rather see development efforts invested into other things than remnants, like a notification center system that integrates all event types, or a proper interface for managing routes (for trains).
Just a personal opinion.

However, I do realize this would not involve the same skillset in the team, and maybe people who would work on remnants are a bit "not really busy" while the others are overwhelmed by the work.

As always, you devs know what's best

[Dixi]

Broken power pole looks sweet but I am happy enough with flat standard debris, especially if the nice one will impede my freedom to move.

That's right! Partial base destruction is an unusual disaster, and I always try to fix it asap. During that time I usually don't care about how it looks like.
I think this part of game is good enough, and it's better to put your efforts somewhere else.

[hitzu]

And the Russian translation is still suffering. With the UI the Cyrillic font is now twice the size of the default Latin one. Previously with the wider font only long words did not fit, now everything.

[BlueTemplar]

IMHO it's the latin text in 0.17 that is too small :
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=67528 (already fixed ?)
viewtopic.php?p=402429#p402429
(And I'm not even using a laptop !)

[hitzu]

IMHO it's the latin text in 0.17 that is too small :
viewtopic.php?f=49&t=67528 (already fixed ?)
viewtopic.php?p=402429#p402429
(And I'm not even using a laptop !)

Devs just use different fonts. They could've used just one from the Unicode library after the UI revamp and have no problems while dealing with one font instead of two. After this FFF I fear they'll just throw the Russian support out too.

This is how Cyrillic looks now in comparison with Latin characters.

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