Friday Facts #343 - Environmental particle effects

[conn11]

(...)
Releasing 1.0 with what is basically a placeholder mechanic with tacked on fluid mixing prevention seems lackluster. I'd take the older fluid mechanics allowing fluid mixing over what we currently have.

I hope they don’t, fluid mixing was just tedious. Either requiring full focus or else being quite punishing.
What the benefit of having to watch out not to mix pipes is, exactly, without any advantageous effects, remains a mystery to me.
Analogously like the removed crafting cost for blue-(and red-)prints and the blueprint book.
Having an overall updated, predictable, system of fluid behavior ist, ob the other hand, certainly a desirable feature.
Not to say having affectable decoration isn’t a nice immersion increasing feature...

[darekols]

I don't see the point to removing plants with explosives, when you can spam left and right clicks with stone tile on it and it will eventually randomly disappear

[steinio]

I don't see the point to removing plants with explosives, when you can spam left and right clicks with stone tile on it and it will eventually randomly disappear

Sounds like fun - NOT

[Serenity]

When properly implemented fluid mixing can be great fun.
Take oni for example. Half the fun is designing fluid and air filters that don't rely on the power hungry built in automatic filters.

Yeah, but that relies on a fundamentally different physics simulation. In ONI you have discreet packets of materials. So mixing works wonderfully. With the way Factorio does things there is no way to make it play well

[BattleFluffy]

I've been thinking about what would be the best "vegetation adding/removal rules" and I think I have a nice idea.

As well as being removed during explosions, I think vegetation should also be removed automatically when concrete is placed.
Concrete with vegetation on top makes for an "overgrown/abandoned" look. This is not consistent with freshly laid concrete.

However, I think vegetation should be automatically added slowly over several hours on bricks/concrete that is both of the following:
1. Not within range of a Roboport
2. Inside a chunk hasn't been visited by a player for a long time.

This is to get across the idea that a roboport creates an "actively maintained" area of the factory. Whereas if there are no roboport/robots or foot traffic, this would eventually (over many hours) lead to limited regrowing of vegetation on the concrete, consistent with the idea of an overgrown "abandoned" part of the factory.

This way we still have overgrown/non overgrown available for artistic purposes, and it saves the player from the tedium of using explosives to clear large sections. It uses the vegetation in a way that helps to artistically communicate the state of a part of the factory.

[Koub]

When the FFF is about particle effects during explosions, but almost everyone is focused on the decoratives

[invisus]

I somehow like that some decoratves remain after paving, but I would rather have stone bricks remove some, concrete remove some more, and refined concrete remove all.

Rather than making this over complicated, and commensurate with time and if the area gets enough foot traffic, I tend to like this simple yet practical idea. This can also been seen as a way to further encourage upgrading to refined concrete.

But as we've seen in this thread, it's very much a personal preference. Some people love the decoratives, and some people clearly dislike them.

Besides completely disabling them or cleaning them up with mods, I think this approach is the well balanced and would hopefully be more likely to be introduced than a proximity to roboports, amount of foot traffic or a growback over time mechanic (although that would be a "neat" detail).

[T-A-R]

While it is an nice addition to have the sprites tintable, the colored particles don't make as big of a difference as i would exect by reading the article. I imagine concrete to break in flakes at on explosion, where the bottom right sand would leave more of a dust ball explosion. So the shape of a particle will have the biggest impact.Also the randomness as used in the proposed beacons (FFF#339) would fit very well in the forming of craters.
But yea, the amount of extra sprites could get out of hand quickly.

[JimBarracus]

I really appreciate that you keep working on creating a devkit for massive mods.
This will make factorio immortal and people will play it in 20 years.

[bobingabout]

Ugh, I just finished reading 3 FFFs in a row.

my eyes are KILLING me!

When are you going to implement a light theme on the main page?

[raiguard]

Ugh, I just finished reading 3 FFFs in a row.

my eyes are KILLING me!

When are you going to implement a light theme on the main page?

Interesting how some people's eyes get killed by dark themes, while others (including myself) absolutely cannot stand light themes.

[bobingabout]

Ugh, I just finished reading 3 FFFs in a row.

my eyes are KILLING me!

When are you going to implement a light theme on the main page?

Interesting how some people's eyes get killed by dark themes, while others (including myself) absolutely cannot stand light themes.

Keep in mind my screen brightness is actually set lower than normal for this...
Also keep in mind the effect of staring at a light, then when you look away, you can still see it for half an hour. Yes... my eyes are VERY susceptible to this, and take longer than average to recover.

So, when looking at a well lit screen... my eyes have the (not actually all that) bright screen "burned" into my retina, the black text barely obscures the light continuing to burn my retina, making the effect maintained consistently across most of the area of my eye that looks at the screen.

Black theme on the other hand, the 99% of my retina recovers, but the white text burns lines into my eyes... and after looking at the screen like this for only a couple of minutes, (Remember, my screen isn't even that bright, set BELOW factory default brightness, my current screen is set to 40%), I have horizontal lines burned into my vision... and my eyes start watering, and it becomes physically painful to continue to look at the screen... and physically painful to look at LITERALLY ANYTHING, Even closing my eyes I'm looking at the inside of my eyelids.

Remember how long ago my previous post was? (It's nearly 8 hours ago) I STILL HAVE A HEADACHE!!!

And that was spending less than 10 minutes reading from FFF's in dark theme.