Friday Facts #325 - New Explosions and Particles

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-325

[rantingrodent]

The destruction effect on those rails makes me wish I had some kind of appetite for PVP in this game.

[conn11]

Easy holidays because, no surprise release... what euphemism , even Santa seems to expirience ups drop, by overstretching his logistic network.

[<NO_NAME>]

This particle box on the roboport makes it look like the character has Parkinson's disease.

[Rebmes]

The destruction effect on those rails

^

[y.petremann]

I feel like that :
- bitter should have a trail of purple blood when we are shooting at them (each bullet make their corpse loose blood)
- construction like rails should explode less (arc being lower, nearest of the construction and less elements)
- shooting particles (like on roboport) should be more on the side the entity is shooted

[Amarula]

Looking more fabulous every week!
I am already dreaming about *ahem* accidentally dropping *another* atom bomb inside my base, just to see all the lovely destructive effects

[irbork]

... so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release.

Rest easy? No. You just made this year Christmas the worst in many years. I hope this period will pass as quickly as possible, so we can start enjoying 0.18 bugs.

[Merssedes]

One thing I think is wrong in provided gifs is that particles spread of dying enemyes are biased toward vertical axis (very noticable with big worm).

[DanGio]

This is nice ! 3 things :
- i hope biters won't bleed when walking into fire. Mass bleeding of biters when using flame turrets would be strange.
- walls and rails shouldn't have the smoke effect when destroyed. Or maybe a more discrete, with smaller radius one ?
- tell us now about the milestone !

thank you for the updates !

[conn11]

In regards to other milestones... we might have something else to announce in the weeks to come .

Spidertron?

[Zaflis]

One thing I think is wrong in provided gifs is that particles spread of dying enemyes are biased toward vertical axis (very noticable with big worm).

I noticed this with the rail destruction. While it looks really nice, being destroyed with bullets doesn't intuitively felt make a high explosion if any. A more calm animation might be better overall, unless it's possible to have different weapons apply different kind of pressure. A rocket launcher could make noticeably more destruction, and nuke twice more. Flamethrower pressure however is nonexistent, things just fall down in ashes or maybe pushed forward a bit.

Just wishful thinking?

[VetraNyx]

unless it's possible to have different weapons apply different kind of pressure.

This would be awesome imho!

And yes, please tell us about the milestone!

[RobertTerwilliger]

I feel it'd be more natural to spawn spray of blood particles for dying WORMS from it's maw.
I believe it is not very hard, because death animation is somewhat fixed, thus one can define particle spawn point and direction (or average direction) just based on entity rotation and timing synchronized with animation.
I suspect it won't be that small change, but worms die not so often, and this death signals about you-vs-biters battlefront progression, so it may worth enhancing somewhat.

[coppercoil]

Explosions and particles look great except rail wood: when it stops, it looks like frozen in the air. I think it’s because there's no shadow underneath. You may say: what a shadow, they are flat. Actually, no: ground shadow is a must. Even tiny shadow gives a big difference.
Moreover, wood must be raised off the ground while lying on rail remnants. Without shadows we have awkward mix of 2D and 3D paintings.

If shadows are impossible, it would be better to choose some smaller particles.

Shadows.gif (838.76 KiB) Viewed 11527 times

[PaszaVonPomiot]

Number of ratings is not the most important indicator. The one that truly matters is the one that shows Factorio as second highest rated game of all games on Steam and that my friends is legendary!

[BattleFluffy]

I love these new destruction effects.

One problem with destruction of entities in Factorio is that once robots are unlocked, destroyed entities are instantly replaced by ghosts so that the robots will rebuild them.

This interferes with the visual effect at the moment of destruction.

Possible solutions... maybe can the graphic for the ghosts fade in slowly? Or appear after a delay?

[IronCartographer]

I love these new destruction effects.

One problem with destruction of entities in Factorio is that once robots are unlocked, destroyed entities are instantly replaced by ghosts so that the robots will rebuild them.

This interferes with the visual effect at the moment of destruction.

Possible solutions... maybe can the graphic for the ghosts fade in slowly? Or appear after a delay?

Sounds like it would make a good experiment. Very interesting idea.

[Bokkie]

This particle box on the roboport makes it look like the character has Parkinson's disease.

Yeah, my first thought was "he can't aim"

[theqmann]

One thing I noticed is that the particles from being shot (before the entity is destroyed) are very short lived. They seem to disappear before hitting the ground, but the particles after destruction are long lived. I would add a longer lifespan to the damage particles so that damaged entities have some ground clutter around them similar to the shell casings and explosion debris. That would also visually indicate that those entities are damaged due to the presence of the ground debris.