Friday Facts #444 - 2.1 Experimental release

[Jap2.0]

I may be wrong but I've kind of gotten the impression that the team wants everything to be more "professional" (for lack of a better word) the past couple years, which undoubtedly makes FFFs take longer to write. And, well, they've done 444 of them already...

Apropos taking longer. If one FFF needs 4-5 hours to plan and write (and I'm quite sure most of them need more than that), writing 444 FFFs are about one man year's work.

And they keep doing it even when we use it to complain at them!

(I say very much tongue in cheek)

[Cygnus]

Loving the new features for 2.1, I thought I would mention 3 other small things I think would suit it since you guys said you weren't finished working on it:

1. Minimum robot requests inside a Roboport.
We can set minimum robot requests inside of Roboport, but not maximum like we can in other logistic groups. This would allow an inserter inserting new robots into the system to be more consistent; Right now if one tries to insert lots of robots at once, the Roboport fills up and there is no way to add more without creating a large robot request to get those clogged robots moving and out of the loading Roboport. This was never much of an issue as robots are usually added gradually, but I noticed it when trying to upgrade to quality robots. This way one could set a maximum number of 0 construction bots in this Roboport and as new robots are loaded in, they move into other Roboports automatically until either, robots stop being inserted or all Roboports are full, at which point a warning would be given to the player indicating there is no Roboport space for robots.

2. Turret priority groups
Thanks to logistic groups, players no longer have to spend much time copying and pasting request settings. Once exception to this, however, is turret priorities. Turret priority groups could fix this and make things more consistent with logistic groups. Another feature that would also be excellent would be a check box inside turrets that says, “ignore order of listed targets”. This would allow more fine control if, say, one wanted to prioritise huge asteroids with railgun turrets over other asteroid types but not care about which type and just shoot the closest huge asteroid.

3. Circuit output separation.
I absolutely love the new changes to circuits in 2.1, but one thing the changes do not account for is that multiple outputs from a machine can combine and contaminate each other. The only instance of this I can think of is the “read ingredients” and “read contents” setting inside machines, but it means that one cannot practically do both with one machine. The only solution was to create a second “dummy” machine that only read ingredients but never had anything inserted into it. This feels weird and given that combinator variables can already be isolated “piecewise” (i.e. one can specify which wire colour should be considered for a condition individually for each variable), it feels to me that it would be more consistent to make circuit specifications inside machines piecewise too, rather than one isolation option for all outputs and one for all inputs. Having said that, given that I’m pretty sure that “read ingredients” and “read contents” are the only examples of where this can occur, so maybe an exception could be made for just them rather than for all variables in all machines, but that would feel arbitrary.

Thanks for all your hard work on this update!

[quineotio]

There is none so entitled as the guy who's paid a whole fifty-five bucks for a game.
Once you've forked over that kind of money, you're practically a part-owner of the company, and should be consulted on every decision.

Entitled? Factorio wouldn't exist without the community. Wube wouldn't exist without the community. Without the support, feedback, suggestions, bug reports, guides, mods, discussions and countless hours of free marketing in videos.

And then they drop SA without any consultation and go silent for a year and a half. There was a relationship. There was love. And then one half of the relationship turned the cold shoulder.

There are some people who put forward the idea that artists don't owe their audience anything. This is bullshit. You owe gratitude and respect. Yes, I and others paid money for Factorio. But do you really think this is about money? For you perhaps.

If I didn't care I wouldn't be here. If the community stops caring they won't be here either, and neither will Wube, and neither will their next game.

[GregoriusT]

And then they drop SA without any consultation and go silent for a year and a half. There was a relationship. There was love. And then one half of the relationship turned the cold shoulder.

Brave to assume there was no consultation with the community, did you like not read any of the FFFs leading up to the release of Space Age?

And after Release they focussed on bug fixing and letting Modders do their thing, because that's what to do right after a Release.

All the while the Devs were definitely still communicating with the Community.

This is the thing with Communitys, everybody in them wants something different, so if you happen to be part of the people who dont like what the rest of the Community likes, then it isn't the Devs fault, its the fact that everybody is different, and you are no exception to that difference between people.

[radical_larry]

Entitled? Factorio wouldn't exist without the community. Wube wouldn't exist without the community. Without the support, feedback, suggestions, bug reports, guides, mods, discussions and countless hours of free marketing in videos.

And then they drop SA without any consultation and go silent for a year and a half. There was a relationship. There was love. And then one half of the relationship turned the cold shoulder.

Couldn't have said it better myself.