Friday Facts #350 - Electric mining drill redesign

[Antyradek]

Well, now it looks as if harvesting only tiny line in the middle, instead of full 5×5.
I guess the drill should move from side to side too.

Otherwise it looks really cool.

[Blacky007]

Would be interesting to see the animations at max speed

can you show the speed with a full blue belt going out from the miner?
I have 900% prod. by research und with some beacons I get a full belt.
Greetings

[Omarflyjoemacky]

Love the new design!

Is it just me, or does the drill start clockwise and end in counter-clockwise?

[qw3ry]

For the sound of a single entity: It will probably sound better if you (visually) leave the drill on when it's lifted.
Also, it makes more sense from the engineering perspective. Why stop the motor if you can keep it running? No breaks needed, no energy-heavy wind up, ...
Still, I think it looks great!

[Shoooter13]

MarvinCZ use addon Bottleneck
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/trold/Bottleneck

[Jap2.0]

Very nice.

Agreed that it could stay in one spot a bit longer; maybe a bigger problem for me is that it seems to "bounce" when it hits the ground. Big spinning hunks of metal being falling downward should not bounce. I don't really see that in Klonan's video, though, so maybe it's my imagination?

Also, obligatory bottleneck comment.

[Optera]

What about the additionnal computing time required ? Is it more (less or equal) CPU-friendly ?

All animations in Factorio are done by shifting through sprite sheets.
The only time cpu is involved is when the sprites have to be moved to and from memory. With enough memory that's only during load.

Also, obligatory bottleneck comment.

Indeed, Now I kinda want that activity light on all buildings.

[5thHorseman]

I'm a bit sad that the iconic miner design is gone.

But damn that's a sexy machine.

I really like every aspect of it, though it does seem to imply it doesn't mine the whole 5x5 area. Whatever you do, don't change that area to match the animation!

[Phasma Felis]

The original mining drill is also very flat like a top-down square. In general we try to avoid square entities like the plague, as they tend to look disintegrated with the world because they don’t try to hide that their perspective isn’t correct.

I kinda wish you had fixed it early on to foreshorten "vertical"/north-south distances to match the apparent camera angle, like the middle example in the first image here: http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_intro/ As it is, It's always jarring to see two diagonal rail lines cross, where the rails are clearly at 90-degree angles but the ties clearly aren't.

Probably much too late now, though. You'd have to redo all the art in the game.

[Monara]

Gotta agree the model itself looks great, but the animation at full speed looks more like it's injecting something into the soil than drilling. It's spending more time jumping from place to place than actually drilling.

[Omnifarious]

Would be interesting to see the animations at max speed

<.... nifty animation elided ....>

I really like the new mining drill. I'm still not necessarily sold on the new icon. But, it does indeed much more closely resemble the actual entity than the old icon.

Is there any fluid sloshing or spattering about in the animation for uranium mining? That's what I'm most curious about.

[J-H]

Agreed on longer dwell time in the ground.

How is the ore getting from the drill head to the "dumps onto the spinning crusher" area? The long rails that the drillhead travels along do not have a pipe, conveyor, or anything else animated to get the ore bits there. They just teleport from drillhead to the dumping area.

I'd like to see some sort of pipe, tube, internal conveyor, or auger (like on a combine harvester) moving them there.

[LostInTheForums]

Would like acid tanks to be bigger on uranium mining drill, maybe even replace all with just a single shiny vertical tank in the corner? New ones are too small compared to pipes connscting to the minining drill.

[Toshis8]

recent design trend seems to be a bit too cartoonish (just an honest opinion)

[warlordship]

I have to say, I'm not a fan. I really liked the old design, but it could use a bit of a fixup. Such as the drill heads ALWAYS spinning the same direction no matter if it is forward or back along the rack. Other than that, it is nice. I DO like the look of the current Uranium miners though. The extra frame around the miner to accommodate the pipes is REALLY cool. If you just use that - minus the pipes - for regular electric miners, I'd be as happy as a biter eating a belt.

This new one is WAY too close to the ugly burner miner drill. The icon is - to me - nearly identical in my inventory. I have to keep reminding myself that the drill in my inventory is not a left-over burner from early-game, it's the new one. Another gripe, is that this does not give the appearance of being capable of mining more than 3 squares, let alone all 25.

If we want to work on a design that works on all 25 squares, why not have a miner with a large pipe/shaft that penetrates the ground. It can visibly rotate as if it is driving a mechanism underground. Then, have a small particle effect appear on the tile that it just mined. Perhaps even have a small drill head pop up and then back down from below. This would give the appearance of the miner digging the ore from below. It would also explain how a miner could reach beyond their 3x3 base, as the particle could appear outside the sprite itself (spawn particle at X,Y coordinate). Randomize the particle effect within the tile too, so multiple heads could pop up in the same tile without clipping (unless you are unlucky and get two hitting the same tile at the same time in the same spot).

This method would also help for modded miners, those that have increased mining range.

[Rebmes]

IDK, I think it's pretty amazing; especially, indeed, with the uranium :p

[ytsejam]

Ok, so it seems we have some drill specialists here

This is not a simulator. I think we should care about the design if it fits the game's style or not. This, unlike that awful beacon redesign, looks great.

[kane.nexus]

Can we please have mining drills share electricity through their frames, up to one tile away? What about a T2 with this ability, possibly 5x5 in size for a 7x7 mining area, or has spires on the corners to connect the wires?

[Reika]

I am split on the redesign. The criticisms of the height, "solidity" of the sound, lack of easy visual distinction between with and without fluid, and of animation not matching mining area are all valid. And I personally am rather disappointed to see one of the last "classic" entity designs disappear.

However, that is not to say that the old design was without issues - several in the FFF are also valid. Personally I probably will end up reverting it, but I am not sure how much of an outlier opinion that is at this time.

[valneq]

I really like the new drill. It's great that the design is similar to the burner drill – it's made by the same engineer, after all. But they are distinct enough to not confuse them.
The icons are maybe a bit too similar, but this might be one of those "just need to get used to it" things.

Considering that the old design never looked like it was able to mine a 5×5 area, this one need not do that either. After all, the ores we see on the ground are not where the real ore is located. The ores are in deeper layers under ground and need to be dug out – hence the drills. The ore we see on the ground is just an indicator for what the prediction is for digging out when we build a mining drill there. Mining by hand is just a metaphor, I would say. Nobody really does that after the first three minutes of the game.

I love the tintable parts: you see that the drills dig out coal/copper/iron! Really great! This will look even more amazing with the other crazy ore colors in some of the modpacks