Friday Facts #377 - New new rails

[jodokus31]

Nice! More spaghetti to the rails!

[Saiph]

The rail updates look really good, except for one thing. You briefly mentioned the problem of manual control when going through complex junctions. How would manual train control be implemented in the final graphic in your post, where one rail splits into five parallel tracks? I think it would be pretty difficult to manually select the correct line from the five options.

[BrainGamer_]

How would manual train control be implemented in the final graphic in your post, where one rail splits into five parallel tracks?

It doesn't split into 5. Curves got basically split into 2 pieces and from each end you can have 3 possible directions to go in.

[FerMod]

I love the new freedom these changes will bring when building rails, and they look more natural than before and feel less tiled. I cannot wait to play with them.

[adam_bise]

The rail updates look really good, except for one thing. You briefly mentioned the problem of manual control when going through complex junctions. How would manual train control be implemented in the final graphic in your post, where one rail splits into five parallel tracks? I think it would be pretty difficult to manually select the correct line from the five options.

It doesn't split to 5, it splits to 2, then 3, then 2 again.

[tolomea]

Soooo how much quality will I need to get 64x64 Roboports? to go with my 32 len power poles.

[Saiph]

..........
It doesn't split to 5, it splits to 2, then 3, then 2 again.

Ok, so you're splitting hairs. Fine. But does that make it any easier to manually drive a train through that junction? No.

[koliw_br]

You mentioned manually laying railway sleepers for 3D models, wouldn't it be easier to write a script that lays sleepers, bends curved tracks and then renders it using blender?

[Loewchen]

Screenshot 2023-09-22 170008.png (697.76 KiB) Viewed 4698 times

Those indicators are weird, they are quite far into the rail and have no counterpart on the other side.

[mmmPI]

Ok, so you're splitting hairs. Fine. But does that make it any easier to manually drive a train through that junction? No.

You have to either go very slowly but that was already the case with previous diagonal stackers.

Or, you can use the shift key to put a temporary stop from your manual train past the junction and delete it right after it cleared the junction which makes it look like you are a super skilled driver.

The dividing into more than 3 is maybe splitting hairs, but if it was more than 3, even while driving very slowly, there would be no way to tell the game you want to go the left most and not the other left or the right most, and not the other right.

[adam_bise]

Those indicators are weird, they are quite far into the rail and have no counterpart on the other side.

Looks to be aligned to a grid.

From the 2 you circled, the corners point straight to the next nearest position, and the lower one looks directly below the one above it, and the upper one looks directly to the right.

If they have to be aligned to a grid, then I'm guessing it was simply either going to have to look pushed in a bit or lose those positions altogether.

[Molay]

YES! YES! Oh this is fantastic! Thanks so much for this, this looks like so much fun to toy around with )

If there's one thing more thing I wish vanilla had, then it would be a roboport-big-power-pole entity that both connects 32 tiles far and covers a 32 logistics area, for that convenient modular print without having excess power cables all over the place (mostly an aesthetic thing, currently you can make such prints just fine with more power poles and the cost of a power pole is negligible, but it does not always look nice particularly in intersections!).

Anyway, awesome news, can only imagine how much work went into that! Thanks Wube!

[juliejayne]

Hurrah! Hurrah! Finally no silly gaps between rails. Proper side by side tracks. Real railways! Hurrah!

[FutureSpec]

Maybe we can get tunnels or rail bridges in the future too?

I've been hoping for this for years...

[solidzaku]

The Fat Controller laughed.
"This is awesome."

[bcwhite]

It was mentioned that saved games from 1.1 will continue to operate. Will rail blueprints made for 1.1 rail still be usable directly or will they need to be updated?

[kulg]

Won't increasing the radius for rails make any existing train circles incompatible with the new stuff?

[Mendel]

I was trying to find when the first friday facts was posted but I only initially found #2
that seems like it was october 4th 2013.
Has it been 10 years since the first one?
Surely when you post the next one, right?

edit: ah silly me, found it now, should have been obvious how to get the url
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-1
That was 2013-09-27

Does the next friday facts come with a cake?


And how about this:
"For now there is no way to deal with the pollution in the "peaceful" way, but there will be in the future. You can imagine pollution clearing machines or even making pacts with enemies to tolerate pollution in exchange for providing them with supply of resources."

[Gergely]

I wonder if we will also get better schedule management. They did mention something about controlling the train system better in FFF-373. Refuel and depot stations come to mind here. The ability to skip a station in the schedule if a certain condition is met, or test if a certain station is available as a condition.

Refueling is just an annoyance but not a big deal if every train station has refueling and a utility train that delivers the fuel.

Disabling stations on supply-demand conditions (disable empty supply stations, disable satisfied demand stations) can very easily cause a deadlock which is super annoying and it would be helpful to allow trains to go to a waiting area instead of them waiting in place for the next enabled station.

one of the new benefits would be that we could easily define pretty much any rail shape

Also, does this mean mods will be able to define their own rail shapes?

[StoneLegion]

I just want to thank you so much. This looks amazing the entire rail part of Factorio has always been my most fav part of the game. The visuals look good and for once they look a lot less wonky and I'm sure that was not an easy task. I loved the rail system before and I'm going love it even more!