Friday Facts #403 - Train stops 2.0

[Zarphos]

Since you've added manual pushing of wagons, I would love if you could I update the wagon model slightly. Adding a ladder at the end like North American boxcar, that our engineers would hang off of when riding them would be very amusing to me and hopefully others.

[SkerrittT]

Thank you again... certainly looking like a fantastic release... wish I knew when its coming out !

[orbit]

OK, you made a great job in hype already. How I should even play now if I now what I am missing already
Getting my feet ready for Flintstones

[Kyparos]

I think the ultimate thing for making remote control of your factory while you are away is a drone hub cart for trains. Just think of it, it already possible to spread your logistics network by placing new drone posts on the edge of it, but it would make process simply annoying to reach distant ore patch.
With a drone hub cart you can easily build station for providing supply for new outpost and initial drone post and then develop outpost in a usual way. Railway fixes also would be easier when you are away with this feature.

Allowing trains with a drone cart to build route on a ghost rails and stop’n’go whenever end of build track is reached would make building rails roads much more streamlined process. Here also comes new system of interrupts, when there are not enough of rails go back and get some. This would require a double headed train and something like a crisscross lane change (if you use right-/lefthanded rail system), but still sounds like a new interesting task on a way of global automation.

Bringing up theme of maintenance trains, it would also be nice to see “filtering” traffic lights. Because there probably gonna be logistics routes and maintenance routes (which could be not so good though off, fit only for short/doubleheaded trains, let trains to go on a “wrong” side). So it would be nice to have an opportunity to exclude some trains from some routes. As a bonus it will make easier to use trains with different count for carts and locomotives. If you want to make an a artillery train track with 100 carts, you can just connect its tracks to your global system, so it could be used by other trains and be sure that it would not block your newly build super logistical roundabout wich support only double headed trains with 3,5 carts in it.

And the last but more important: all this additions fills natural to factorio. They allow to make the same things but with much less pain in the as and much more reliably, so you can forget about your (almost) perfectly tuned factory while you’re exploring other planets.

[aka13]

Very nice, great changes!

[dasiro]

dunno if it's already implemented, but is there a shortcut-key to press while building over an existing rail to have it as a bridge rather than a crossing? From the map view it would be a blessing to have as few intersections as possible, even if a slope will have an impact on the trains speed, I'd prefer it over having to come to a complete standstill.

[againey]

[*]It would be a lot easier if the "HOLD [ctrl+]shift" for rail planner [with obstacle avoidance] was replaced with "press shift/ctrl to TOGGLE", as it would also help in resolving the above issue.

Going further, if it is a toggle, then there's no need to even use modifier keys. There are other keys bound to contextual actions make no sense while placing rails, and thus can be reused while in rail placement mode. For example, F or G. F is already overloaded for different contexts (pick up items on ground, flip blueprint); might as well add another special context to its binding.

This would avoid issues where Shift+R is used to reverse rotation, but Shift also toggles rail placement mode. A developer can try to smooth over the rough edges of that situation, but it's never perfect. For example, I might press Shift in preparation to rotate, but then I change my mind. I release Shift and now I've toggled my placement mode. That has annoyed me in numerous applications/games in the past.

[Tec]

It seems like the map view train copy paste uses some other shortcut way than machine copy paste, could this be aligned to also allow dragging mouse to set multiple stations?

[picklock]

And another great FFF.

Since I like playing with trains, I think the announced innovations are great. I can hardly wait to finally play 2.0.

I could have used the renaming of all stations in my current playthrough. I made a typo and renaming them individually was a pain.

As studix2002 already wrote, I would also find it better if the name of the station was also saved when creating blueprints. It still happens to me that I forget to click the check box when creating a blueprint and then have to create the blueprint again later.

[PhanTomFoolery]

Nice!

Is there something we have missed?

3 Things:

• Rail planner shortcuts are barely usable when you try to rotate them with the "rotate" shortcut. The planner shortcuts are not configurable in the game and they collide with rotate CW/CCW modifiers. It would be far better if using "R" during rail planning remembered the rotation when mouse moved without me needing to press R 7 times again when I just moved my mouse one tile up. Why it doesn't work currently:
  • holding SHIFT for ghost planner makes pressing R rotate counter clockwise. There is no way to rotate clockwise in ghost rail planner mode.
  • can't rotate the rail in ghost planner with obstacle avoidance (CTRL)
• It would be a lot easier if the "HOLD [ctrl+]shift" for rail planner [with obstacle avoidance] was replaced with "press shift/ctrl to TOGGLE", as it would also help in resolving the above issue.
• It would be nice to finally get a separate "read locomotive fuel" signal out of a station

I like this a lot. The ghost rail planner is a nightmare to use, to the point where I often just abandon it and place rails in a 2 or 3 step process involving manually deconstructing anything in the way, etc etc. Also while we're talking about QoL changes, I'd really love to see constant combinators toggle when you ctrl + click or shift click on them, would make my day

[ESI85]

Will we be able to drive the trains backwards from remote if they are in a deadlock and just have one locomotive?

[Alenonimo]

It's getting better and better. Love all the changes. My wish for Flintstone-mode... some feet animation

proxy-image.gif

What if we could do this with the car too? The car do have some storage so there may be a situation where you're using one to haul stuff and it runs out of fuel. Would you really let it become bitter food, storage and all, just because of a lack of fuel when you're strong enough to push a train with your feet?

It doesn't need to be fast or anything. It could even have an animation of the engineer pushing it from behind. It would be pretty funny. Extra funny if the speed increases while being chased by biters.

And tanks, let's not forget the tanks too. I wanna see streamers messing up and then get chased to death while pushing a tank accross the landscape.

[gangan]

What happens if a train runs out of fuel on an elevated rail, without an engineer inside? Do we have to use another train to refuel the "dry" train?

[lm-]

Awesome changes, but one suggestion and an added QoL.

Instead of showing stop name when you hover over train stop. Show all names within specific radius of the cursor.
Because right now, I may know that station is "somewhere around here", and I will have to hover over all stops to see which one I'm looking for.
Think, like it's an spying glass, that when hovered over some area, reveals hidden information

[Upserter]

What if you run out of fuel on a bridge, and there's another stopped train in front of you? Does pushing push that one too, or damage it, or are you still stuck?

[ChefOfRamen]

I think the ultimate thing for making remote control of your factory while you are away is a drone hub cart for trains. Just think of it, it already possible to spread your logistics network by placing new drone posts on the edge of it, but it would make process simply annoying to reach distant ore patch.
With a drone hub cart you can easily build station for providing supply for new outpost and initial drone post and then develop outpost in a usual way. Railway fixes also would be easier when you are away with this feature.

You have just described a spidertron.

That said, a "roboport wagon" could be interesting.

[adam_bise]

Copy paste from map, bulk rename, remote driving, rail planner from map w/ super force build.. These are all nice things, thank you.

[gorbag]

Flintstone mode seems... silly and breaks any semblance of physics (inertia is not something so easy to overcome). Why not just add sidewalks to rail bridges instead, allowing the player to walk to the stuck train and refuel it?

[Kadet123]

Love and appreciate the QoL updates. One minor thing that I find out of harmony..

It's nice that we can do so many things now from map view, like remote driving trains, connecting wires, changing combinator settings, etc, all from another planet even. How is it that getting signals across a single planet without using poles takes largish power sucking radar towers? I like the previous FFF's radar ability, but it feels like the Shortwave mod's characteristics fit better thematically (in size, power, and channels).

[flapje]

Copying the colour of existing stops is nice, but it would have been great if it set the train limit to 0 instead. Another option is to have a menu setting that changes the default train limit.

Since it uses the train limit of the train stop where its set the lowest. It should be possible to create a dummy stop with it set to zero to have it as the default.