your thoughts on menu simulation

[NotRexButCaesar]

It was not meant to be rude nor complimentary

Sounded pretty rude to me.

[NotRexButCaesar]

Existence of the sound slider doesn't change that the default value is way too high.

How can you complain about that? "I don't like that the options were set to values I don't like when I first updated"

[Jap2.0]

How can you complain about that? "I don't like that the options were set to values I don't like when I first updated"

Obviously one person's opinion can't be held as absolute truth, but there is a place for reasonable defaults. I've seen far more people saying that the menu simulation sounds are too loud than too quiet.

[bkayes]

Just adding my thoughts on the menu simulation to the mix here:

1. I think the background music should play longer in the menu. I *really* enjoyed listening to the calm peaceful background music combined with the low murmurings of the factories, but was disappointed when the music stopped.
2. The biter/combat scenes are too frequent and too loud.
3. The scenes are too short and have too aggressive of a transition, it's kinda ugly to look at the screen when a transition happens.
4. I agree with a previous poster that a really long shot, potentially with a pan or something would be super stellar.

Overall extremely cool, and I'm very excited to see what happens with it in the future. Great work!

[pichutarius]

1. I think the background music should play longer in the menu. I *really* enjoyed listening to the calm peaceful background music combined with the low murmurings of the factories, but was disappointed when the music stopped.

my suggestion is to resume gameplay music after the trailer music ended.

[ssilk]

Today I watched the menu for about two hours.

There are some Easter eggs in it. For example there is a spider under the menu, watching for it’s kids. Since the 1.1.6 update the player doesn’t die anymore, when fighting for the big biter base.

I really like the menu simulation. It has some hidden jokes in it. And It gives new players an idea of how big this game is. It shows how to do things. But just the result, and not how to get to them. Spoiler? No. You still need to build it yourself.

Too short? Well, it shows a fast pace, it matches to the game. But I like the burning forest. I think there could be more scenes wich are very long. 5 minutes are so are definitely too long.

Too much combat? Definitely. We need 100% more scenes without combat. Quite boring scenes.

I’ve some ideas for scenes:
- small biter village, biters just running around
- a very dense forest, you hear the player walking around but don’t see him
- water, many fishes, very nice strand
- a factory at night near to energy collapse, brownout, no coal, everything dies
- then the biters come, lasers out of energy, boom
- combinator stuff! A binary clock or something simple that shows something with combinators
- rails, many trains, player followed by biters, crossing first rail, train comes and hits the biters. That was near! The player stands on second rail and another train comes, but before the player is hit, the scene changes.
- left and right the same factory, left is supplied with robots, right with belts. When the scene starts left is fast, until the moment, when all robots need charging.

-

[eradicator]

My only thought: Where are the next/previous buttons?

[blazespinnaker]

Love it. Very inspiring for a new player. Sounds freak me out sometimes, though. But that's cool.

I watched them all. Just want more. It'd be really great if the community could share sequences.

[jodokus31]

Switch them off now. It's too distracting. Maybe i switch them on later again

[NotRexButCaesar]

Love it. Very inspiring for a new player. Sounds freak me out sometimes, though. But that's cool.

I watched them all. Just want more. It'd be really great if the community could share sequences.

Because mods can set the simulations, the community can share them in a way.

[blazespinnaker]

Yeh, you can save game plays. I dunno how they implemented it, but hopefully in a way it won't be a stretch to easily submit and share.

It'd be a great way to discover new perspectives on how to play the game in interesting, compelling ways.

[ssilk]

To the sound of the simulation: I tested that and I would run the sound through a low-pass filter, like in the game e.g. when in research mode. Much better.

[pichutarius]

Tried IR2 mod today, it has only one scene. Its way better than sudden transition every 10 sec. And way more quiet and classier. I wouldn't oppose to 3-4 diff scene everytime i open the game.

In contrast, Vanilla just scream: woohoo u see that trons there? U SEE DAT OSOME TRONZ?

[Deadlock989]

And way more quiet and classier.

That's me in a nutshell, innit.

[mmmPI]

I like the fact that's optionnal. On my old laptop there is a delay during scene transition, which freeze the background but also the ability to interact with the menu which is unfortunate. The more frequent the scene transition the worse it gets.

Apart from that i like the idea of having game images as the menu. I think it allows to leverage the time spent polishing in-game assets. I wouldn't mind having no menu image at all, if you were to go extreme on that logic.

Another (very) old game i know does this with the menu being at the bottom of the screen, 4 square horizontal instead of several vertical rectangle in the middle of the screen. It let you see the middle of the image which isless frustrating to me

[Jap2.0]

And way more quiet and classier.

That's me in a nutshell, innit.

Lol

[Optera]

The most annoying things about Factorio scenes:

1. zoomed in too much
   manually zooming out is pointless right now because 2)
2. switching every 10seconds
3. too combat focused
   This is a factory building game not a spidertron combat simulator

Show a nice factory scene with lots of moving parts.
For example: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HallOfFame/

[Redpossum]

I like it but it needs more fighting, more guts & gore and BIG explosions, less of the boring assembly line stuff; there are videos of that all over YouTube. Everybody and his dog has made a Factorio video, (including some people who seemingly can't string 5 words together into a coherent sentence.)

It would be amusing if somebody made a few with parody of famous directors' style. Michael Bay with car chase and huge boombooms, JJ Abrams with blinding lens flare, etc.

[maxp779]

I think the menu simulations are fantastic tbh. Wouldn't change a thing. I saw the the same thing done in OpenRA and it was very cool there too.

[jamiechi1]

I like it. Not too distracting and it sounds ok. Although I always have the music disabled. (Never enable music in games.)
I agree it would be nice to see more animations without biters. But don't remove any existing ones. More variation is better.
I disagree about making them with less focus though. I have issues when my eyes try to focus on something and can't see it better. Gives me a headache.
It would be nice if it would turn into a screen saver after a set time period and hide the menu. I did find that it was easy to drag the menu off to the side and just enjoyed the show.