Friday Facts #89 Timetables

[Cerus]

Those turrets look really nice!

[Acetylene]

I am really loving all of the graphical changes that have been showcased on the blog especially these new turrets; Factorio's art style is awesome. Looking at the new turrets and comparing them to the old ones demonstrates the push to define the look and feel of the game. Great stuff.

I am surprised by the 2016 summer release date, I didn't think there would be that many changes due as I thought they wanted the first pass of the endgame to be in 0.12 (although I might be wrong about that). I must say though that the team seems to be handling themselves much better and being more realistic than any other early-access game I've played.

Very excited to play 0.12!

[indjev99]

Of course there would also have to be some sort of Priority system and a more thought through resistance system so that you actually have to mix various turret types and use the priority system so that each turret works more efficient.

I have an idea for this. It's in described in this topic: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 16&t=10053

[Zero The Dragon]

Hey developers? Can we see some trains in next weeks news post?

[Mr. Thunder_Tw]

Nice work!
Looking forward to the new rail-signalising system, v0.12 is going to be a hit.
I bet you'll be able to see it in the sales, rocketing towards a humongous amount of sold copies when it's released on steam.
I'm glad to hear that this summer wont be a rushed v1.0 deadline. Phew

[jerrycheng]

Excuse me, what is the meaning of "For the ammo turret, it means less fiddling with inserters. "?

[SomeDuder]

Excuse me, what is the meaning of "For the ammo turret, it means less fiddling with inserters. "?

Because the turrets are now made up of a grid of 2x2 instead of 1x2, placing inserters and making sure that they align with the turrets wont be as much of a hassle

[jerrycheng]

Excuse me, what is the meaning of "For the ammo turret, it means less fiddling with inserters. "?

Because the turrets are now made up of a grid of 2x2 instead of 1x2, placing inserters and making sure that they align with the turrets wont be as much of a hassle

I see, thank you very much.

[kaldskryke]

Aww yiss! 2x2 turrets are much better!

I've been tinkering with writing my own combat rebalance mod, and one of the first things I did was increase the laser turret size/graphics to 2x2. This went a long way in reducing how overpowered they were, because while the damage/cost stays reasonable, the "damage density" goes way down and allowed my 1x1 gun turrets to have at least one advantage. Lately, I had been thinking about increasing guns to 2x2 as well and buffing them in other ways. And now that my laser turrets are more like Obelisks of Light (slow firing, high damage), I could potentially make them 3x3... but I'm already irritated by how pixelated the turret looked after stretching it out to 2x2

The new turret graphics look great, and I'm very stoked the devs are giving them a balance pass. I hope that they look at creating some meaningful contrasts between the two, whether that's in terms of firing rate, durability, range, or maybe using Laser Resistance on only certain mobs in order to create niches.

tl:dr; increasing turret size will decrease the "damage density" of a field of turrets, which is a great way to nerf them without screwing with the damage/cost ratios.

[chris13524]

I am confused, how does one own a turret? Also, are the turrets replacing the laser (turrets?) and the other gun one, or is it a sort of second tier? If they are replacing them, how is backwards compatibility working out? Will laser turrets become not craftable and removed in a future version, or be remove completely now?

[chris13524]

With the new turrets, it might be cool to make a sort of "cannon" or really powerful gun. It would be 3x3 or maybe 4x4, good for defending entrances or high alien attack areas. Could use many of the weapons the player can. Normal bullets, rockets (might destroy base). Would be cool if the player could get in it and shoot things manually.

[infinitehubgear]

I am confused, how does one own a turret? Also, are the turrets replacing the laser (turrets?) and the other gun one, or is it a sort of second tier? If they are replacing them, how is backwards compatibility working out? Will laser turrets become not craftable and removed in a future version, or be remove completely now?

The way I understand in 0.12 is the existing laser and gun turrets are being replaced with 2x2 versions. This is probably going to ruin backwards compatibility, depends how much this community protests You can still research damage bonuses etc and feed the normal and piercing rounds.

I've no idea what's planned for 0.13, it might be fun using tank shells in something like a Grand Cannon

I'd like the laser turrets to fire beams similar to the combat robots shown here but with more epic visible firepower!

[Shaymes]

the turrets looks awsome, what you thing about a flameturret and a missileturret?

[KrzysD]

I see you guys rendered it in a higher resolution is this for a release into a high res mod?

[c3040]

ok so if say i want the game on steam can i request a code to have it on steam?

[Zeblote]

I see you guys rendered it in a higher resolution is this for a release into a high res mod?

This isn't a HD texture:


Neither is this, for comparing:


However, this is:


Still hoping version 12 will have the HD textures for everything...

[kovarex]

Still hoping version 12 will have the HD textures for everything...

This is not going to happen

We have currently high res versions of 2 entities (the 2 we presented in the fff already), and the new entities are prepared and rendered for high resolution as well, but it is not tested nor integrated.

The old entities need a lot of work to make it prepared for the high res render.

TL;DR It is going to be a lot of work to make high res version of everything, it will probably happen, but we will not do it anytime soon.

[roy7]

Looking at them though, it struck me that we still have only one tier of them. Shouldn't we have several, of several techlevels, like with other things? Yellow, red, blue, for example. We only have yellow now.

More turret options are planned for 0.13, but we had to start by consolidating the existing ones

Yay for new turrets!

It occurred to me something I'd like to see, inspired by the advanced tree farms, is an advanced gun turret that can connect to the logistics network to request ammo directly from bots. Maybe you'd prefer to leave that to mods. But one reason I tend to rush laser turrets is the simplicity of not needing to deal with ammo, inserters, etc.

[Gemoron]

several people have mentioned the imbalance between gun and laser turrents because of size and costs. energy is much cheaper than ammo + logistics. in addition, ammo is just way too weak. to fight any of the tier 3 enemys, and I guess they will be useless vs the new Tier 4 biters.

Maybe there should be a research that allows gun turrents to be refilled by logistic drones. I also think there there should maybe be a new, tier 3 turrent shooting tank shells, rockets or a combination (using guns at small/medium biters and bigger rounds for everything else). such towers would require a standing logistics system as well as a factory with a large footprint to withstand frequent attacks.

I think your setup you did while fixing 0.11 is paying off now with much faster developement cycles.

And about steam: you are already more than prepared enough to release on steam. you have good graphics, a (nearly) bugfree experience and an addicting gameplay. In addition you have around 85k sold copies, and according to greenlight postmortems on gamasutra, around 5-10k are already enough to claim greenlight. Maybe you need a better trailer to grab the attention of greenlighters, as the first 5 seconds count to prevent the players to leave quickly and you have to have them by 30 seconds to vote yes, or loose them as well.

Video games can't overhype, they can just underdeliver as a bad game will vanish one way or the other. Factorio is great, and with a bit of preparation, you rock the stores. the spike in sales after DW20's let's play prooves that your game just requires more screentime. go factorio.

[Qcor]

What about the main interface? Any plans of redesigning that?

With no mods installed the crafting window seems ok. There are only few well organized tabs and it's not that hard to navigate between them.

The matter changes DRASTICALLY when you have few big mods installed. It becomes a total mess and finding anything becomes a pain in the a..
even despite the efforts of mod authors to somehow organize new stuff by creating new tabs. It's just that the amount of new stuff is huuuge and the game changes from 'how to build a nice base' to 'where was that recipe?! I'm sure I saw it somewhere'

Ofc I do realize that mod support is not the only most important thing in game development but lets be honest - these days the modding community is very important when it comes to keeping the game alive on the market... so I guess they deserve some love

Maybe I'm crazy.. but IMHO the current gui is just not good enough to support bigger modpacks.