Friday Facts #288 - New remnants, More bugs

[Albert]

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.
Screenshot_465.jpg
Screenshot_466.jpg
Screenshot_467.jpg

We are not planning to throw Russian away. Consider this issue a bug, we will take care of it, soon.

[Unknow0059]

The weirder and more difficult a bug is to track down the more I enjoy working on it and finally seeing it resolved. Naturally as I've spent so much time working on bug fixes (in the same code base - and always going for the difficult ones) I've gotten quite good at it.

The idea of becoming a proficient difficult-bug hunter is appealing.

I think the rightmost pole looks the best. The others are too busy, and invade other tiles.

[Mylon]

Very interesting FFF about remnants.
However you need to do something about it while not having unlocked bots yet. I once had an attack by bitters which destroyed lots of my stuff and at the end I couldn't see the damage because of the bitters bodies and of course WHAT building they destroyed since It was not ghosted.

What if building remnant ghosts were a toggle-able at-start feature like the research queue? It doesn't make sense for new players, but veterans may find it useful.

[BlueTemplar]

This !
(Or enabled like the Alt-bar is, for all games, once you research bots...)

[Quarnozian]

Remnant Collision: What if instead of it being a hard stop like running into a wall, it was instead a slow-down effect? Like carefully crawling over a bunch of destroyed objects.

I would also love the same effect being used for going over pipes, and squeezing between tight trees.

[Adael]

You could apply some logic to it. It would require all remant set to have at least one that ONLY stays in its own tiles:

When (entitiy destroyed) Select (random remnant from avaliable list)
IF (remnant is on top layer of overlap stack)
DO nothing ELSE
Select (random remnant not tested from avaliable list)
Repeat

This will ensure randomization of remnants, but will check to see if you have overlapping problems and rectify before creating the visual remnant.

You could have another check in when things are placed around remnants:

IF (placed object) causes remnant to not be on top layer
Delete remnant

Simple, brilliant and elegant solution

[Lilly]

One neat solution that would completely bypass all the rendering order issues, is to also export depth information when rendering the images. These can then be used during rendering to fill the depth buffer (or z-buffer) for occlusion. Another benefit of that is that you only need 1 image+depth info for rail tracks instead of multiple layers.

One game that uses this trick is the Sims 1. Here's an example, notice how the couches intersect at the arrow, even though those are 2d images:

sims-depth.png (191.06 KiB) Viewed 7897 times

[BlueTemplar]

We realised how simple things can become complicated in no time with Factorio.

. . .

Have they played Factorio?

[RobertTerwilliger]

I don't see remnants are of any usefullness except for scenario aesthetics.
Just set an option "place ghost when any building is destroyed" (not deconstructed) enabled-by-default, and it solves any further issues.
Move all remnants (except for few general 1x1 ruin tiles) to map editor as decorative elements of some kind.

[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.
Screenshot_465.jpg
Screenshot_466.jpg
Screenshot_467.jpg

We are not planning to throw Russian away. Consider this issue a bug, we will take care of it, soon.

Really glad to hear that. Thanks

[Ringkeeper]

shouldn't be the QA and bug reproduction be happening but a different department and you get only the final reproduction steps? or don't you have a QA department yet?

As someone that works in the gaming industry i know the pain with QA (my wife is QA for our games) and the RTL /non-latin languages.... sometimes it's not worth it to implement RTL correct, tooo much effort for not enough gain, even if it would be really nice and make some players happy.
Cyrilic on the other hand is a total different story, same with polisch/all baltik languages.... sooo many special characters that can mess up sooo much

Worse if you have to translate from korean/japanese to english....
1: please give more space for the text
2: why ? isn't it enough
1: yeah, no, you have 3 symbols there but in english thats a whole fu... book
2: oh....



and a fun QA story:
dev: please test website
wife: its broken
dev: what did you do?
wife: i clicked here, then there, back button, clicked there, then here and now its broken
dev: thats not how you sighn up, why did you do that?
wife: because i can
dev: but thats not how you do it
wife: BUT I CAN, now fix it

[BlueTemplar]

Well, if you expect your software to work internationally (if it connects to the Internet for instance), it seems like going with Unicode (UTF-8) should solve a lot of these issues ?
Of course, a problem comes with many programming languages and software tools still being stuck in the 16-bit era : Lua has no Unicode support, and Windows and C++ use obsolete versions of Unicode...

[5thHorseman]

and a fun QA story:
dev: please test website
wife: its broken
dev: what did you do?
wife: i clicked here, then there, back button, clicked there, then here and now its broken
dev: thats not how you sighn up, why did you do that?
wife: because i can
dev: but thats not how you do it
wife: BUT I CAN, now fix it

QA Engineer walks into a bar early morning opening day, and orders a beer. Orders 500 beers. Orders -1 beers. Orders "'); drop table employees;" beers. Orders 1.8 beers. Orders asdklfj beers. Leaves happy.
The first actual customer walks in, asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes.

[Sean Mirrsen]

In terms of "remnants", I was always fond of the way Total Annihilation handled the unit/building wrecks.

If something is merely "destroyed", it leaves a recognizable wreck that blocks movement like the original unit/building. If it's dealt enough damage on top of that, the wreck is reduced to generic fragments that can be walked/driven over. And the wreck at any point can be either reclaimed for some resources, or fully rebuilt into its original form with a specialized unit (that only one side had access to, but that's beside the point).

In Factorio, I think it could be an interesting development if "destroyed" structures that were merely "rendered inoperable" would leave actual building-type 'wreckage' that resembles the building and continues blocking the way. Biters would seek to only wreck your facilities, not actually demolish them (unless they're physically blocking their only path), thus in the aftermath of an attack you could choose to repair the wrecks (if you have the necessary tool or bot type) rather than replace the original structure.

There's some choice to be made on what would happen if you were to just replace the structure over the repairable wreck. Probably having you lose out on the resource savings would be fine (i.e. if you're doing that you probably have enough resources as-is), and it preserves the original gameplay style. But giving the option to salvage the structure before rebuilding (a job for a new salvage bot type!) would also add an interesting layer to any potential resource-starved challenges.

[meganothing]

First of all, yes, remnants are a very minor problem, but I guess the art guy(s) need something to do. (May I suggest more animations for the spidertron )

Whether a remnant should collide with the player: Since remnants could be used as indestructible walls if remnants collided with enemies like aliens and enemy players remnants can't collide at all (except if the footprint of the collider is smaller than the original building and/or the building is exessively expensive or the remnant can be destroyed too)

[GrumpyJoe]

As a (not-computer-)hardware bugfixer

skinner-thumbs-up.gif (313.8 KiB) Viewed 7606 times

Bugfixing is fun!

[pleegwat]

Worse if you have to translate from korean/japanese to english....
1: please give more space for the text
2: why ? isn't it enough
1: yeah, no, you have 3 symbols there but in english thats a whole fu... book
2: oh....

Similarly English to German.

1: It's 7 short words and there's plenty of vertical space.
2: No, it's one long word in German.

[bobingabout]

Worse if you have to translate from korean/japanese to english....
1: please give more space for the text
2: why ? isn't it enough
1: yeah, no, you have 3 symbols there but in english thats a whole fu... book
2: oh....

Similarly English to German.

1: It's 7 short words and there's plenty of vertical space.
2: No, it's one long word in German.

I remember talking with Duggy, he married a german. Yes, germans like long conjoined words.

[booter]

Worse if you have to translate from korean/japanese to english....
1: please give more space for the text
2: why ? isn't it enough
1: yeah, no, you have 3 symbols there but in english thats a whole fu... book
2: oh....

Similarly English to German.

1: It's 7 short words and there's plenty of vertical space.
2: No, it's one long word in German.

I remember talking with Duggy, he married a german. Yes, germans like long conjoined words.

But you can use "Silbentrennung/Worttrennung" to use the vertical space

[Dry Hairy Tree]

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...

Everyone is correct - except the person who should be doing their homework not playing games...

I did get the initial figure wrong (I said 1% not 0.1%) - so my final figure was wrong. Thanks Blue Templar for clarifying the actual issue.

The math is fine.

It's a simple hack to remove/add zeros or shift the decimal point. 1% is 2 zeros less than 100%. 1% of any number is two zeros less than that number (move decimal two places)

e.g. 1% of 237.8 = 2.378. You can then use multiplication (of 1%) to get any percentage of any number. Of course, everyone's got a cellphone now so mental mathematics is largely historical. This is a shame as it is good for us. Factorio encourages a lot of mental arithmetic. So there's that!

Plenty of math geeks here would leave me for dead in that field. But my basics are a'ight.