Friday Facts #68 - The trains

[kovarex]

The updates, this time mainly about train fixes coming in the next release: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-68

[keyboardhack]

Getting hyped for 0.12!

[JLBShecky]

I am looking forward to finally being able to try out some modded trains after this next update, and and really taking the time to invest in a siginificant railroad system as well as it is something that I have not put much effort into finishing at any point to date despite how much I enjoy trains.

[Xterminator]

Yeah can't to set up some awesome rail networks and for all the great stuff coming in 0.12
Keep up the great work guys!

[El-Lobo]

Hmmmm, there is something strangely familiar about that place. Well, i think, i won't take down the savegame for a time. Or will I?

[ssilk]

I tried to explain the algorithm and under which conditions it is calculated https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... th_finding

Is this correct: recalcing before a possible signal stop and when was stopped?

[XyLe]

Thank you one more time guys for such a great game! I still enjoy it a lot, and your friday facts are very interesting to read as always! please just keep up your great work! *tons of respect*

This may be a wrong place to ask a couple question, please forgive me if that's so. But i hope the devs read my message and if they are kind enough - answer my questions, here goes:

1. I don't understand why you show us damage+range on our weapons but don't show that information on the enemies, only the damage+resist. That's pointless to know how far i can shoot without understanding my enemy range. if I can only understand which weapon can shoot farther without being related to anything else it's just not making enough sense. I've never seen a game where you can only see range on your units but not the opponents. So why is it like that? And while i'm still on it can you please fix that? xD

2. Night vision is really not pretty.. everything is way too green and poison kinda looking.. but late-game is just retarded without the goggles. i really wish that the color or transparency could be changed or adjustable in config files. Maybe it already is? if not do you think that night vision goggles could use some work? I'd just make it a bit less intensive.

3. Robots+roboports.. Well, there's a few things i'd wanna point out actually, the main idea is that you can't really get the robots out of the system easily if you want to. or did i miss something? i must admit i'm not an expert apparently i still don't know all the things you can do in the game. I know for sure you cant use smart inserters to take the robots out of the roboports. Maybe it's worth implementing? it's not hard at all.. But it would be cool to have like a button in each roboport to make robots just sit there and stop working for whatever reason. Maybe you wanna save up some energy while you're changing things or you just wanna see how many robots you have there or you wanna get rid of some of them and have less. Maybe you wanna destroy your factory with shotguns/grenades but the robots ruin all the fun Right now they just fly everywhere and if you wanna catch them you have to deconstruct roboports or click on them while they're flying i guess, and i wish you haven't.. possible?

next thing, as long as there are only 2 kinds of robots why do you have the only one total number of them in the robot count indicator? it's like 35868 robots and how many of them are for construction and how many for logistics is just impossible to figure out...

and when i have a lot of different things in the logistics system the list i see is hiding somewhere below my screen, so i can't even see everything i have in the system and it's kinda silly to have such little control over it, the whole list that you see on the right of your screen is just pointless if you can't see 100% of it. So is it hard to fix? will it be fixed soon?

4. one last little thing. Burner miner mining coal doesn't show the amount of coal in it. Almost everybody uses setups of 2 or more burner miners facing each other, it would be pretty useful to see on the right side of your screen how much coal it has already. Do you think that's easy to make and reasonable enough?

i'm sorry this looks more like "ideas and suggestions" but i don't know where else to ask these questions , they bugged me for months. Now i hope to get an answer from you and get it out of my system hah

so thank you very much for your attention and in advance for answering!

[El-Lobo]

Just read about pre-signals. Never played any openTDD or sth. like that before. Only one thing to say: I WANT THEM NOW!

[SuperSandro2000]

What are pre-signals doing? some big signal network or so?

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

finally pre-signals! WOO!


Been waiting for some trains updates! sounds like this next one will fix some train netoworks.

[JLBShecky]

I've never played OpenTTD myself, but from how I understand it from reading it's wiki it would check signals immediatially after it and if any of them are green it would show green. IE if you had a train unloading area with 5 sidings each on their own block and then one presignal leading up to them if any of tracks were free then the pre signal would be green as well but if all of them were red then it would also be red.

[bonob]

What are pre-signals doing? some big signal network or so?

They're useful to prevent a train entering a critical section if it's not sure it can leave it.
Without it, you can't have a two-track station that runs smoothly.

So, yay, pre-signals!

[El-Lobo]

Basically you can link the entrance and all the exit signals of a block. More: http://www.tt-wiki.net/wiki/Pre-signals_tutorial

[Choumiko]

Reading the topic of the FFF: "Yes, yes, yes"
Reading the news:

presignals, more circuit logic. I can't wait

[bobingabout]

Ze trains! Ze trains!



unrelated to trains though, one of the things I find... annoying, about Factorio Multiplayer.... it spends all its time doing the tick per tick sync stuff. I literally get about 3 ticks per second, so thats like, what, 20 times longer than gameplay time. we summed it up with "unplayable".

Sugestions Send change data every tick, sure, perhaps not even every tick, but fairly often.
Send the checksum once a second at absolute maximum, 60 ticks minimum. and allow it a fair ammount of time to actually get there, say another 60 ticks.
Also, do away with that latency thing, relly entirely on synchronisation, it guesses well enough anyway, that latency thing is really annoying when you have to set it to 500ms minimum just so the game works at all.

[ssilk]

What are pre-signals doing? some big signal network or so?

See OpenTTD: http://wiki.openttd.org/Signals#Pre-signals

And really cool would be smart signals, signals, which have some implemented logic, that can be constructed via circuit network.

[safan]

ooh smart signals like in "only let the train leave the copper mining outpost if the main base has less then 1000 copper ore"

I'm absolutely waiting for something that will automate these trains

but presignals are already a good start

@developers: you can already see the difference on enthousiasm on trains and the floors of last news flash. I think it's pretty clear floors are not that fascinating

[matheod]

Can someone explain me

penalty of 2 * length of the block divided by block distance from the start, so the far away occupied paths don't matter much.

Thanks !

[ssilk]

A train calculates a possible path.
If there is an occupied block in that path, it will take the length of that block, multiply it with 2 and divide it by the block distance to the block.


Simple example:

We have a simple track, 300 rails. At position 100 and 200 are signals, at position 300 is the target train stop
Between 100 and 200 drives a second train.

Calculation is:

300 (for the total distance)
Plus
100 (length of occupied second block) * 2 = 200, divided by 2 (block distance) = 100

So the total weight of this path is 400. If I calculated correct.

[roy7]

If a train stop is blocked and the train decides to go around it, what happens to the train's schedule? Is it still going to that stop and it'll drive around the network until it gets back to it? Or does it skip that stop and go to the next stop in the schedule?

Also, since some discussion has been made regarding pre-signals and multiple lanes for trains to pick up or unload, is there any sort of way to do that currently? Can you set a train to go from "Ore Area 1" to "Ore Dropoff 1" but name two stops to the same name "Ore Dropoff 1" and the train will go to whichever has a green path? Or fake this in some other way?

Thanks.