Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

[vaderciya]

This was interesting enough to make me login to my forum account after 5~ years of not posting.

Honestly this is just amazing, and its exactly what we've been missing for a long time, turning Nauvis into a much more interesting place to exist in.

I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I think these FFF have spurred on the community and what we now think these planets can be, and what improvements can be made. So, with cliff/tree/height generation being overhauled.... can we finally do it? Can we have mountains, or are we doomed to 2D flatness?

[Engimage]

Changes to terrain are awesome!

What I feel would be awesome to add is...

RESOURCE GENERATION!

RSO is so popular for a reason.

Looking at dynamic map changes while tuning water settings just made me recall all of the inconvenience caused by resources spawning under the water (thus absent), and overall inconsistency of said resource generation. The predictability RSO gives you just hits the spot. I hope some day default generator will be as viable!

[D1398342003]

I like the rivers in mapgen, adding fords to connect paths through them would prevent them from being a total obstacle. Something traversable by the player and biters, but not able to be built on. There could also be an early to midgame research to unlock artificial fords that work similarly, but also allow rails. Some combination of stone, stone bricks, and walls, but it only works on shallow water. Fords would probably have some speed impediment, 80% or something.

[Anima117]

You say "Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all.". Ironically, I would have been surprised that there would have been none. But then, I guess we can all be happy we live in the universe where you decided to update Nauvis anyway! No regrets to be had then! These look great to me, can't wait to see the new generation in the game, along with the rest of the expansion.

[Kadet123]

try clicking on the rocket at the bottom of the article!

haha that's cool, how long has that been there?

[FuryoftheStars]

try clicking on the rocket at the bottom of the article!

haha that's cool, how long has that been there?

I'm posting from a mobile right now, so it doesn't show for me, but if you're referring to when you click it you get "launched" back up to the top, that's been a around for a few years at least. I don't remember exactly when it was first introduced.

[Saphira123456]

I still think that all of the stuff said in these FFFs could have been done in such a way that we didn't need five new planets, rather than just revamped Nauvis. (For example, have a random number of lakes actually be volcanoes, have randomly occurring thunderstorms, randomly placed pre-destroyed factories where scrap harvesting is a thing, etcetera.)

I also still honestly believe that gameplay will be identical to 1.1, with a couple of new loops but everything else still being mind-numbingly simple. Nothing has been shown to make me think any different.

I will admit that the new terrain generation looks great. That's really all though - it looks more beautiful, but there's almost no changes to the gameplay. IMHO, almost none of this expansion stuff really does any expanding.

So far, the expansion is worth five dollars, tops. Since it's literally just a graphical upgrade from 1.1 with a few new buildings and loops, maybe some improvements to the existing mechanics, but no new ones. (The ability to void objects or recycle them is something that should have been included in the 1.1 base game, long before now, instead of having to add a mod to do that. Because of this, I don't count voiding and recycling as new mechanics, since I already use those mods, which were added long ago, and minimal effort could have been spent to add them to the base game.)

If it weren't for the new buildings and things like elevated rails (which will be a game-changer, radically altering the game and making it considerably easier, but are NOT a new mechanic per se) then it might as well be $0.00 - free.

[mill_yama]

haha that's cool, how long has that been there?

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-352
2020-06-19,About 4 years ago

[AdmiralCrisp]

Love the new cliffs!!! I've always loved cliffs and have dreamed of having a walled off base by mainly relying on natural cliff faces to make a natural fortress of a factory. Glad to see I should be able too!

[FasterJump]

The end result looks amazing.

One thing: when looking at the last zoomed-out pictures, I realized that when zoomed-out enough, all the map looks kind of the same. Could you change the "scale" of the map generation using noise, so the "scale" is different in some area of the map?

Basically, I envision a map with 200% scale in average, but depending on the area, the scale will drop to 50% or increase to 400%.

That would be quite complex to implement. Maybe the map generation algorithm should work in a non-euclidean space.

[YanMaojie]

will shallow water generate naturally now？

[IronCartographer]

RSO is so popular for a reason.

It's largely inertia at this point. Originally it was the only way to get a reliably viable starting area with the frequency set to low (for a rail world style experience) because there were no special rules in the base game for spawning resources you needed at the start, making it harder and harder to find a good combination the more rare the deposits were on the whole map. I think RSO standardizes deposits more than the base game's flavor target point, so I wouldn't expect changes to the ore spawning along those lines.

[Svip]

I wonder if the new map generator is noticeably slower than the old one, as it appears slightly more complicated. The FFF doesn't discuss performance impact at all (at least not as far as I can gather). I'm going to assume that its performance impact is negligible, thus making this a very efficient improvement.

Looking at the paths map, the red lines are for canyons, but why don't they produce rivers? Is it for fear of blocking when they interact with the other paths? In that case, the solution should be to create a kind of shallow water that would allow the player to cross (a ford), of course slowing down the player.

[Sopenas]

Well i usually just turn off cliffs because they annoy me. Not sure if this overhowl will change that for me.

[Joe Black]

Super!

[TheSpirit]

Wow! This new terrain looks so much more fun to explore and conquer

[TaxiService]

very exciting FFF! loved reading about the inner workings of these systems, and the results look gorgeous!!! great job : )

[fishycat]

That was an absolute fantastic and interesting reading! Would have loved to see Kovarex' face when you presented your "little" side project. I promise I'll play with cliffs on again , looks very promising and actually useful.

[corsairmarks]

That was a fascinating read! Your passion for this project was very apparent through the copious images, descriptions, and gentle walkthrough of the "current state" and "future state." This is why I love supporting companies with passionate teams - improving the game is a valuable goal in and of itself.

So - cheers! And consider me 100% sold on the expansion (was about 75% because who knows what I'll be focused on when it releases). This sort of attention to detail deserves my financial support!

[mcdjfp]

I am still worried about the cliff explosives delay, but I am reassured to see at least an attempt to fix the more annoying things about cliffs as they are. Will have to wait and see how things turn out.


Personally, I would still like an early game, somewhat expensive (and single use), manual use only way of removing 1-2 really annoying cliff sections.