Friday Facts #307 - 0.17 stable candidate

[eradicator]

before we can call Factorio finished

I can't help feel a bit sad at the thought of this. I know it's selfish to think so, after all the many, many years of work, and of course it will be fantastic to see game complete and have many new users brought in by the game leaving early access. But at the same time I'm also not looking forward to the possibility of a time with no regular updates, no FFFs, and all the rest.

Not to speak of the long wait until the next game they make gets anywhere near as good as factorio.
/me still traumatized by the long wait for 0.17.

Maybe some small surprises along the way.

spidertron confirmed.

It said small surprise, not revolutionary event that changes the paradigm of war against nature.
Hopefully someday.

It also doesn't say that you're gonna like the suprise .

[Serenity]

[Moderated by Koub] As explained here, off topic.

[Astrella]

[Moderated by Koub] As explained here, off topic.

[crambaza]

viewtopic.php?p=1848#p1848
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=48047
[Koub] btw : this is not an Oxygen not included forum, si I suggest the ONI discussion stops here.

I was discussing the Oil Changes, and how in [game that cannot be mentioned] that it presented a similar problem to the "old oil": Multiple outputs, and locked flow.

I explained that in [game that cannot be mentioned] that I didn't quit, but was actually happy that a game challenged me, and that I appreciated the Devs respecting their audience enough to give me that option.

My post is 100% about Factorio.

[BlueTemplar]

Declare stable and going into vacation sounds like drama.

On stable the old 0.16 players join in and will find new bugs.

I propose to wait until after vacation.

The satisfactory train bugs drama lasts weeks now due vacation of the train programmer...

I agree that there is some risk involved, but did the Satisfactory devs keep patching bugs beforehand for ~6 months after a major release ?
Factorio devs sure earned that vacation ! (Also, it was most likely planned months in advance...)

P.S.: I really hope that the following issue has been carefully considered for this first 0.17 stable release !
Early massive biter attack

[Tekky]

some small surprises

I hope one of them is Spidertron mentioned 3 years ago?

I am against Spidertron being added to the vanilla game, for the reasons that I have stated in this post of mine in the Spidertron Factorio Friday Facts news thread.

However, as I have also mentioned in the post of mine mentioned above, since the Spidertron has been hyped so much over the years, I think it would be nice if the developers released an official optional Spidertron mod.

[conn11]

some small surprises

I hope one of them is Spidertron mentioned 3 years ago?

I am against Spidertron being added to the vanilla game, for the reasons that I have stated in this post of mine in the Spidertron Factorio Friday Facts news thread.

However, as I have also mentioned in the post of mine mentioned above, since the Spidertron has been hyped so much over the years, I think it would be nice if the developers released an official optional Spidertron mod.

Though you have to admit, that getting a vehicle through a crowded factory can become quite a destructive process. Spidertron is optimisation

[Pi-C]

Though you have to admit, that getting a vehicle through a crowded factory can become quite a destructive process. Spidertron is optimisation

Are you like me and bump against every power pole, inserter, assember etc. you come across? Then you should give Auto drive a chance! Just point out the destination with your remote control and the car will find a clear path to it without wreaking havoc all over your base.

[Yijare]

"sneaking"?!
How could it be less sneaky than that two FFF with their associated Forum threads?

because as it stands, oil is an abnormination and this is a case of: we do it and peps will forget we did it. ergo 'sneaky' has nothing to do with 'stealth'. Remember the first belt vs bot wars? no? good.

I believe I have already thought about every proposed change to oil, and tried to explain in the relevant threads why each of the proposals had big at least one big flaw. [...]

LEss flaws in logic than the inplemented one. And if players are, in plain fact, detered by a problem that needs just a bit of thought and you make it easier for them, that they'll never need to think, you are tending to the wrong group.

I have arrived to a conclusion that a perfect solution is impossible, but the solution shown in FFF 305 has downsides in fluid mixing and gui, however the rest works -
in terms of recipes, game flow, progression and making dealing with a complex form of oil processing mandatory.

Complex? You give us the highest (and thus most complex) thing without even trying to refine the stuff. just put in an be gone. Why should I even want to go to advanced processing when that is giving me crap? Yes I need that stuff to process further along but heavy and light oil are producsts that separate before petrolium. thats what all the outrage is mainly about. logical flaws. Change is good, but this one just keeps older players from enjoying the game. And thats what you should be more concerned about - the longterm playabillity. The quik krone is maybe a good way to get development further along, but you guys ditched more than one late game idea. We have a Mod for an Idea proposed in FFF74 and FFF111 (Space Exploration) and heck, i'd rather play with that.

If I'm good, I beat the game as it stands in the 8 hours for the archivement. where's the fun in that? After launching a rocket you can continue, but you have no goal whatsoever. From 0.14 to 0.16 the biters went from being use full to an anoyance. I remember automated artifact transport system so you could get that alien science running w/o having to go hunting all the time. And in 0.17 they are much more than an anoyance. but they have thier place on nauvis and they are still the reason we need millitary research. You could easily make them to be more than just an enemy that just 'exists'.

We already have had a plan for entity gui which will just improve all entities overall (the Status visible in hover tooltips should explain a lot when better visible and the overall layout of what is ingredient and what is product will make more sense overall),[...]

That would make things easier on 'new players' than this oil change. And even help us old hags.

Maybe some small surprises along the way.

spidertron confirmed.

You guys really want to get WUBE into legal trouble, huh? The FCE Dev would happily file against them. Just saying.

And about that morderation on ONI - i understand why it was done, but when people bring up games that have a similar Problem to solve, it shows that there are other ways to solve it. I never tried that game but am inclined to try it out. As i have yet to play Rimworld. (but am 'stuck' with factorio for right now )

[Koub]

I don't mind a discussion on the different approaches ONI and Factorio may have with different subjects.
But it should be in its own thread in off topic subforum, not within a FFF thread.

[eradicator]

You guys really want to get WUBE into legal trouble, huh? The FCE Dev would happily file against them. Just saying.

I'd like to believe that even the trigger-happy FCE guy is not so stupid as to think he has a right on "spider shaped robots". Those things are basically in every second sci-fi work.

And about that morderation on ONI - i understand why it was done, but when people bring up games that have a similar Problem to solve, it shows that there are other ways to solve it. I never tried that game but am inclined to try it out. As i have yet to play Rimworld. (but am 'stuck' with factorio for right now ;-) )

Btw, i stopped playing ONI exactly because of the frustrating (both logically and implementation wise) pipe mechanics. Because they randomly stopped working and wouldn't restart without partially de+reconstructing them.

[DaveMcW]

they randomly stopped working and wouldn't restart without partially de+reconstructing them.

That sounds like Factorio 0.16 pipes.

[eradicator]

they randomly stopped working and wouldn't restart without partially de+reconstructing them.

That sounds like Factorio 0.16 pipes. :P

Never seen a factorio pipe "freeze" in place refusing to transport anything, got examples? In fact i don't remember ever having pipe troubles in factorio except too slow throughput.

From a design standpoint it's also rather different. In factorio you're supposed to use one pipe per fluid type, and all pipes are bi-directional. In ONI you don't really have any other choice than to use one pipe for several fluids/gases, which causes all sorts of problems, especially because ONI pipes are one-directional, and the engine "smartly" decides which direction you get (and sometimes mid-construction changes it's mind about the direction...), which causes yet more problems. (Disclaimer: At least when i tried. Might have been fixed in the meantime, though i doubt it because it felt like a design flaw, not a simple bug.)

[Yijare]

I'd like to believe that even the trigger-happy FCE guy is not so stupid as to think he has a right on "spider shaped robots". Those things are basically in every second sci-fi work.

oh, he would. but thats not the point of this thread

Btw, i stopped playing ONI exactly because of the frustrating (both logically and implementation wise) pipe mechanics. Because they randomly stopped working and wouldn't restart without partially de+reconstructing them.

As Koub stated, we are no ONI Forums, but ...

Never seen a factorio pipe "freeze" in place refusing to transport anything, got examples? In fact i don't remember ever having pipe troubles in factorio except too slow throughput.

Oh, the pipes can have that behaviour in 0.15 to late 0.16. Happend before to me. because there was 0.0000000051 of a fluid left in it, that didn't belonged to the fluid that should be pumped through it. Thats the 'broken' fluid mechanics in Factorio in a nutshell.

[eradicator]

I'd like to believe that even the trigger-happy FCE guy is not so stupid as to think he has a right on "spider shaped robots". Those things are basically in every second sci-fi work.

oh, he would. but thats not the point of this thread

You can have your opinion, i'll keep with mine ;). But it reminds me of https://www.callingbullshit.org/ → "Refuting bullshit is an order of magnitude more expensive than producing it." (Not you, the FCE guy.)

Never seen a factorio pipe "freeze" in place refusing to transport anything, got examples? In fact i don't remember ever having pipe troubles in factorio except too slow throughput.

Oh, the pipes can have that behaviour in 0.15 to late 0.16. Happend before to me. because there was 0.0000000051 of a fluid left in it, that didn't belonged to the fluid that should be pumped through it. Thats the 'broken' fluid mechanics in Factorio in a nutshell.

Fluid mixing has never worked properly in factorio, and as of 0.17 we can assume that it was probably never intended to, a pitty, but not broken design. But ONI forces you to mix even though it doesn't work. If i wanted to argue "realism" i'd say that 0.00000001 fluid remaining is actually correct. If you pump crude-oil through a pipe you can't expect to be pumping crystal-clear water two minutes later. I guess the "bug" was that it somethines actually went to proper 0.0. Has anyone confirmed that in 0.17 the pipes actually always retrun to proper 0.0, or always keep a fraction?

[Nova]

What even IS FCE? And why should WUBE care for them?

[eradicator]

What even IS FCE? And why should WUBE care for them?

Fortress Craft Evolved is a 3D factory building game on an alien planet. And the developer is notoriously active aggressive towards basically everyone :p.

[Dominik]

We asking about liquids flow in pipes, that works kinda bad now. We see a pipe of a good diameter (I'd say about one meter+ visually, and it performs so badly.

Isn’t it less than 1m diameter considering the tiles are 1m square?

Still, yes, it’d be nice to have the fluid mechanics fixed.

What kind of flow would you expect ?
IIRC, Klonan said last year that when the new fluid system is implemented, pumps would be rebalanced to transfer significantly less than the max 12kL/s in 0.16 - not sure if they will go lower than the max 8.4kL/s in 0.17 ?
(Liters for the unit because IMHO it's a bit ridiculous to try to guess what the unit is - either from water calorific capacity - which works quite differently from real one when taking steam into account - or from pipe size, which is obviously limited by graphics/legibility issues... so might as well go with the usual unit !)

Fluid system changes are still being worked on but are complicated (every algorithm has some issues) and there are still other things to work on with higher priority - such as bugs for the stable.

About the flow speed - calculating fluid unit from heat capacity does make sense, but I don't think the heat capacity was designed based on that at all - I think it was designed simply to work well with the rest of the game. So I would base the unit rather on the size of fluid related stuff. E.g. one barrel holds 50 units, real barrel has some 160l, so there you have 1 unit ~3l. Then if a pipe has diameter of 0.8m and length 1m and holds 100 units, you get a unit of about 2l. With such numbers the throughput would also be reasonable.

[meganothing]

What even IS FCE? And why should WUBE care for them?

Fortress Craft Evolved is a 3D factory building game on an alien planet. And the developer is notoriously active aggressive towards basically everyone :p.

Thanks for clearing that up. If I google spidertron, all I get is Power Rangers. So Bandai-Namco would probably be the party able to sue, if at all.

If Wube wants to be safe they just have to use a slightly different name.

Or get a licence for one: Even farther back in history Wasteland used the name "Scorpitron", asking Inxile what they want for licencing the name would probably be a simple twitter message/email away.

[eradicator]

What even IS FCE? And why should WUBE care for them?

Fortress Craft Evolved is a 3D factory building game on an alien planet. And the developer is notoriously active aggressive towards basically everyone :p.

Thanks for clearing that up. If I google spidertron, all I get is Power Rangers. So Bandai-Namco would probably be the party able to sue, if at all.

If Wube wants to be safe they just have to use a slightly different name.

Or get a licence for one: Even farther back in history Wasteland used the name "Scorpitron", asking Inxile what they want for licencing the name would probably be a simple twitter message/email away.

That's because the thing in FCE is called "SpiderBot", not -tron. Though both are equally generic terms and it's doubtful that Mr. FCE wasted money on attempting to claim a trademark on it*. I also bet that on the off-chance that wube actually ever makes the spider-thing they'll think of a nice unique factorio-ish name for it. At least i consider "spidertron" to be just the projects codename, not the final product name. For example the spider-shaped unit in SCFE (Supreme Commander Forced Alliance) was called "Monkey Lord".

*Not a lawyer™ but as far as i know you can't sue anybody over a name that you don't have a trademark on. So it's perfectly legal to use names from old games, it just doesn't make for very good marketing.