Friday Facts #388 - Smaller things for 2.0

[mrvn]

regarding formula in text fields...

is it possible to do 4*iron chest or 4*steel chest or similar? (or even better 0.5 iron chest)(not sure if it would need to be "ironchest" or "iron_chest" or "ironchest")

granted this is less needed in the base game, but allowing for it would allow for modpack chest sizes to be easily handled.

presumably this would require a change to the item classes for chests to have an identifier that allows for them to be recognised as allowed in these formula, with the default being not allowed, but it would mean for example if you have an 8 carriage train, with 6 chests with loaders being able to write that in the circuit logic as "8*6*steel chest" would allow for easy updates with chest upgrades (or train size upgrades)

Anything based on container or with an inventory would be allowed as unit for solids, anything with a fluid box as unit for liquids. No need for any extra identifier.

[Kallinger]

I am a little bit confused about the bot coloring, isnt that already in the game?
My bots are green, bots from my friend are blue, the only new thing i can spot are the red bots?

[Lizzy]

I just want to comment that I love the cover art on the Steam announcement page. I love those big renditions of small items, I think they're beautiful!

[malecord]

It's very sad that Wube would say that they won't be around anymore after 2 million years.

Yeah but they will surely have automated the bug resolution before disappearing so I wouldn't be so concerned.

[nuhll]

I've always wanted an always running background Factorio world, now it will be possible

I'd like to request a "factorio as screensaver" mode, please

lol i like that idea

[H_Sage]

Nice! Now it remains to improve the most important part of the Factorio gameplay (Quality of Life): convenient and fast construction of conveyors using automatic rotation of the conveyor towards the cursor, as is implemented in Mindustry. Or assign a key to change the operating mode (improving R). No mods, vanilla.

[Qon]

Nice! Now it remains to improve the most important part of the Factorio gameplay (Quality of Life): convenient and fast construction of conveyors using automatic rotation of the conveyor towards the cursor, as is implemented in Mindustry. Or assign a key to change the operating mode (improving R). No mods, vanilla.

Use mods.

[lacika2000]

I feel the same way, if you visually improve the placement of underground belts and pipes then I would have expected something like this, where the maximum range is painted directly on the ground as long as the cursor with the counterpart is on the same line.


Had already edited the image before I read through the posts and found the sketches.

This is an absolutely brilliant and the most self-explanatory approach. I wish the devs will implement this as shown above.

[Zefiro]

Wooooah... time to make a forum account.

Dear Factorio team,

I'm super-stoked for Factorio 2.0! And eagerly reading your FFFs. Thanks for giving so much insight, also into your design process.
I know I'm on the lower numbers compared to a lot of folks, just recently having completed my firsk 1k hours of gameplay and will thus never reach even the 32bit tick counter. Yet, it's my all-time favorite game since years, I've had so much fun derived from it that I will gladly pay you for v2 even if I would never play it.
Thank you soooo much for Factorio!

One of the many things I like is that most games derive gameplay, "challenging difficulties", out of tedious tasks and repetition (especially "mobile casual games" are the worst) and while what I'm actually doing in Factorio is... repeating the same tasks all over again I feel it's for actually making progress, not because the UI is slowing me down and making me do unecessary stuff. So your many little improvements (as well as a couple mods) are really great.

Regarding number calculations, often - especially in personal logistic requests where not throughput but space is the constraint - I'd like to set the amount to X stacks. So if I get displayed that the currently selected item has a stack size of e.g. 50, or I could directly enter "2s" (and then get displayed that this amounts to 100 items), that'd be helpful.

Coloring drones on the map is neat. Would it be possible to re-draw the serviced areas of the drone network, or at least prevent auto-connection? Similar to how I can take a copper wire and 'unwire' some power poles to create a disconnected area. This would allow to have a tiny core logistic zone inside a big one, or have outer defense wall reparation zones which can directly touch (even overlap) without the drones intermixing and travelling long distances.

(speaking of distances: my personal roboport drones seem to prefer doing the work 'outside in', i.e. first what is furthest away from the character. Often I prefer they would start near myself, especially when I'm moving along anyway)

Cliffs: we cannot rebuild cliffs, and while I don't mind to bulldoze over water, I sometimes put down wood flooring above landfill to make it look like I'm actually on a wharf. So I often deliberately don't even build cliff explosives to prevent over-eager drones from doing big landscape transformation.

The green range indicator for underground infrastructure is a perfect idea, I already love it.
One more idea: when I hold power poles in hand and plant them running, they auto-connect to their maximum inter-pole-connection distance. You recently mentioned they'll take existing consumers into account, which is neat, but unsatisfying (and uneven). I'd love to have a mode switch to place them apart at a distance that they fill the whole space with electricity.

Assembly Machines: the right-screen-side on-hover information could show the icon and name of the currently selected recipe, and which material it's missing this time... (or perhaps that can be added by a mod? will take a look)
And the hover over them in e.g. the construction popup could show the dimensions (2x2, 3x3 etc)

Speaking of mods, the one mod I cannot live without anymore, and thus *WILL* enable in Space Age, and even hope you could make it canon: Bobs Adjustable Inserters. The freedom to just put stuff from anywhere to everywhere inside a 3x3-tile-area is just too powerful not to use. I've spent hours minimizing science factory footprints by placing intersecting inserters in tight spaces. But even the trivial "but a wooden crate next to an asembler with a 90° inserter" is already worth it.
I mention this as for narrow spaces in the space platform this would make a difference.

Planets... Ah, Vulcanos. As a dragon, I'm super excited and looking forward to it. Though I was ever so slightly disappointed that your title "swimming in lava" did not actually involve getting into that nice hot bath.

Space Platform: I love the tentacles. Also, the thrusters just look beautiful (showing of their roaring power and jiggling around while simultanously looking like a fragile frontier-of-science prototype build), I don't care that they're unrealistic outside the atmosphere

I'm also looking forward to the new Decider Combinator. Doing more complex work just takes too much space, so I rarely do it. I've looked into using one of the Warehouse mods to build an "integrated circuit", i.e. put all combinators inside this building and just run power and data wires into it. What I read from the mod descriptions this quickly runs into a game limitation about how signals are propagated. But perhaps the need will go away with this new combinator.

Logistic Groups: yet another headache solved elegantly
Railway placement as well.
Same for remote building and visual indicator of ghost entities. In a recently overrun dense defence wall (I'm currently playing a combination of deathworld and railworld) it's really hard to see which inserters etc are not replaced yet - even worse with ghost power poles, which do show power lines which aren't actually there.

Yes, holding back on creating an account and now writing this obviously lead to a flood of ideas and wall of text. Please see it as just one fan showing his enthusiasm

[Qon]

This is an absolutely brilliant and the most self-explanatory approach. I wish the devs will implement this as shown above.

Even better suggestions have been made in the thread already...

I would even go another step further and display the max range while placing the underground entrance.
A bit like the "Show Max Underground Distance" Mod

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/show-max- ... d-distance

Maybe even add a shortcut to automatically build the exit at max range, too.

This way you don't have to remove the down underneathie over and over to adjust the up underneathie position.

Actually why not turn that "TOO LONG" into:


Maybe this isn't as useful for underground belts but with pipes building a long stretch of underground pipes has better throughput than plain pipes and with this you could build a long pipeline with 2 clicks.

And multiple placement of underneathies by clicking further away would be great. Even more so for pipes which I need blueprints for as it is now.

[Mycroft4114]

I feel the same way, if you visually improve the placement of underground belts and pipes then I would have expected something like this, where the maximum range is painted directly on the ground as long as the cursor with the counterpart is on the same line.


Had already edited the image before I read through the posts and found the sketches.

I also like the idea of coloring blocked fields red.
But probably only for the preview of the maximum range.
I would leave it green between the in- and output, otherwise it could be interpreted as an error?

I like this visualization, and throw my vote in for "This is the best way to show this." It helps you see the max distance before you get there, it gets around the "some of us are colorblind and can't see the subtle color shift" problem, and it lets you place it anywhere on the line without feeling forced. (If you've used the current mod for showing max placement distance, it places a square at max distance which makes me feel like I have to put it there, even when I don't want to for layout reasons.)

This is better. maybe make the color difference between the green and yellow a bit more pronounced. (Because some of us are colorblind, and green weak is the most common type. Don't rely on light green to get your point across.)

[Lunarexxy]

I also wanted to chime in and say that relying solely on color for showing important differences, in just about anything, risks being partially or totally useless for colorblind players. All designers should have that warning hanging on their wall.

The solutions that Tooster and others have suggested are excellent, though. I hope they're considered for adding into the game.

The issues that your colorblind players are raising should also be noted for the new map drone colors. It's shown as a QoL improvement, and it can be, but that's only the case if you know what the colors mean, and if you can even tell them apart at all.

[mrvn]

I also wanted to chime in and say that relying solely on color for showing important differences, in just about anything, risks being partially or totally useless for colorblind players. All designers should have that warning hanging on their wall.

The solutions that Tooster and others have suggested are excellent, though. I hope they're considered for adding into the game.

The issues that your colorblind players are raising should also be noted for the new map drone colors. It's shown as a QoL improvement, and it can be, but that's only the case if you know what the colors mean, and if you can even tell them apart at all.

That would be easily solved by making the color configurable.

[Dev-iL]

Regarding the number parsing... I'm surprised nobody mentioned this before, but the most interesting activity about this for me would be trying to break the game via code injection. Who knows, naybe there's a CVE lurking around the corner

[Qon]

Regarding the number parsing... I'm surprised nobody mentioned this before, but the most interesting activity about this for me would be trying to break the game via code injection. Who knows, naybe there's a CVE lurking around the corner

Why?
Why break into a program on your own computer? You already have full access.
And how would a simple formula evaluator suddenly make it an interesting target for security bypass? You can try that right now instead, doing multiplication isn't some huge complication that gives the textbox a large attack surface. It's not like they are going to compile your text input into a separate executable and run it with higher privileges than the game itself has.

[GregoriusT]

Regarding the number parsing... I'm surprised nobody mentioned this before, but the most interesting activity about this for me would be trying to break the game via code injection. Who knows, naybe there's a CVE lurking around the corner

Why?
Why break into a program on your own computer? You already have full access.
And how would a simple formula evaluator suddenly make it an interesting target for security bypass? You can try that right now instead, doing multiplication isn't some huge complication that gives the textbox a large attack surface. It's not like they are going to compile your text input into a separate executable and run it with higher privileges than the game itself has.

Because Factorio has Multiplayer Support, and with such an exploit it could enable Clients and Servers to hack each other, as stupid as doing that would be. And considering Factorio is even sandboxing all the Mods, so you can safely download and play with Mods without having to trust some potentially shady Mod Dev, I can only guess the Factorio Devs wont let arbitrary code execution happen in something like a number parser.

[pleegwat]

Regarding the number parsing... I'm surprised nobody mentioned this before, but the most interesting activity about this for me would be trying to break the game via code injection. Who knows, naybe there's a CVE lurking around the corner

Why?
Why break into a program on your own computer? You already have full access.
And how would a simple formula evaluator suddenly make it an interesting target for security bypass? You can try that right now instead, doing multiplication isn't some huge complication that gives the textbox a large attack surface. It's not like they are going to compile your text input into a separate executable and run it with higher privileges than the game itself has.

It was basically a 1 line change since we already have the code to parse math expressions to define the infinite technology cost.

Any vulnerability in there is already available by defining malicious infinite technologies in your mod.

[Qon]

Because Factorio has Multiplayer Support, and with such an exploit it could enable Clients and Servers to hack each other, as stupid as doing that would be. And considering Factorio is even sandboxing all the Mods, so you can safely download and play with Mods without having to trust some potentially shady Mod Dev, I can only guess the Factorio Devs wont let arbitrary code execution happen in something like a number parser.

Even if it's multiplayer, the game is written in C++, a compiled language. They can't do unsafe eval() even if they wanted to, unless they add a non-sandboxed Lua with full computer access or include a compiler to run the input, both things are hardcore attempts at engineering a vulnerability. Can't accidentally happen.
If it happens accidentally then it would be something like a buffer overflow, but then it doesn't really matter that much if it's a text field, number field or a calculator field. And as you said, they know how to sandbox mods, why would they not be able to handle something orders of magnitude simpler?
And as shown it seems the calculation is done in the client only and the only part that becomes part of game state is the final output number. So even if break it your injection wouldn't spread to any other players client.

[mikerosoft666]

WOW !!! And by wow I mean Holy Crap !!! And by holy crap I mean really nice work you guys.

I’m just a beginner so I’m still boggled by how much this game does without chugging. Can’t wait to see what’s next

[mrudat]

Regarding the number parsing... I'm surprised nobody mentioned this before, but the most interesting activity about this for me would be trying to break the game via code injection. Who knows, naybe there's a CVE lurking around the corner

Why?
Why break into a program on your own computer? You already have full access.
And how would a simple formula evaluator suddenly make it an interesting target for security bypass? You can try that right now instead, doing multiplication isn't some huge complication that gives the textbox a large attack surface. It's not like they are going to compile your text input into a separate executable and run it with higher privileges than the game itself has.

Because Factorio has Multiplayer Support, and with such an exploit it could enable Clients and Servers to hack each other, as stupid as doing that would be. And considering Factorio is even sandboxing all the Mods, so you can safely download and play with Mods without having to trust some potentially shady Mod Dev, I can only guess the Factorio Devs wont let arbitrary code execution happen in something like a number parser.

I boldly assume (and really hope) that the expression evaluation is in the UI layer, and as far as everyone else is concerned, you just typed 86400 into the box, not "1 day in seconds".