Friday Facts #350 - Electric mining drill redesign

[MEOWMI]

I like this redesign, it's more authentic. I was somewhat fond of the old design and it never bothered me but the new sprite looks good.

The fact that it digs a 5x5 square area was just a seemingly believable logical extension of the fact that it was designed like a square - a shape so ubiquitous in logistics.

[Hiladdar]

New miners look good, and they match the new icon, which was my concern. I like what I see in the videos, and expect the new miners to look great in the game.

Hiladdar

[Overlord218]

New sprites look good! But they break some in-game logic:
We have resource fields, resources exposed to air that mean we don't actually need to mine for them we just need to harvest them. If you want to make drill thing you need to redo ores textures.

[Philip017]

i am also on the bandwagon for longer drilling time, vs moving around, imo the drill before move should be at least 5x the animation time it takes to move to the new location, but also on the point where i was used to the old design harvesting the ground with it's back and forth motion with the circulating drills. anyways a slight animation tweak could be all that is needed

[Sba]

I think the developers should be consistent with "this" "Bottleneck" "extension for the driller, and insert this for all producing buildings ....

[petr.adamek]

Guys, this is AWESOME. When I started to read the article, I was curious and scared at the same time, because the mining drill is one the most important (and for me the most iconic) item in the game. I liked the old design and I was not event expecting that you will be changing it. But I am really excited about the result. It is very obvious that you have spent lots of effort with the new design and I believe that you made many iteration and thought carefully to bring the innovation without breaking the Genius Loci. And you definitely succeeded.

Thank you!

[JoneKone]

Looks and Animation are great, but that sounds ... horrible ... sound like a damaged miner that explode every second.
Its to glaring ... when i must hear that longer i got headache.

Yes the sound is very constant and buzzing it's like 100 flies in a jar

[Creepopolous]

While I like the overall look and the sounds, I must agree that the drills should linger a bit more. But IIRC, the resources gathered is currently uniform. If you wanted the mechanics to accurately reflect the longer suggested animation, you would to need to change the order in which the resources were mined.

EX: row in front of the machine gets mined, cue shifting animation when row runs out, rinse and repeat until you reach the back.

[LightspeedLazer]

The new design looks great, except it's kind of tall in my opinion. The old design looked stable because it was low to the ground, but the new one kind of looks flimsy. I think if it's lowered it'll be fine.

[JackGruff]

It looks really cool. But, the player hits electric miners pretty quickly. This looks really sophisticated for something so early.

[MeduSalem]

Seems like one of the few rare cases where I liked the old graphics better because of its simplistic nature and it overall looking less convoluted.

[valneq]

Seems like I am alone with the feeling that I liked the old style better because of its simplistic nature and it overall looking less convoluted.

Mining outposts always looked way too clean because of the miners. I like the fact that the new ones are more convoluted. When comparing mining outposts and refining / chemical bases there will be more homogeneous chaos
And let's face it: assembling machines with lots of belts and inserters are also waaay more convoluted than the old clean mining posts.

I just hope that the assembling machine redesign will go in the same direction with more movable parts and more structure to the machine – rather than just a simple block trying to look complicated.

[Impatient]

Looks awesome!

Something that crossed my mind, when I read ...

"The resource layer, the pipe contents and the smoke emitted by the drill bit are all tintable layers, specified by resources, which make it very dynamic and mod friendly."

... was this: Why don't you gather inputs from the modders when you are about to redesign or reprogram aspects of the game? Some bright and easy to implement ideas might come up, which might vastly increase the moddability and create openings for interesting new mod ideas.

[MeduSalem]

Mining outposts always looked way too clean because of the miners. I like the fact that the new ones are more convoluted. When comparing mining outposts and refining / chemical bases there will be more homogeneous chaos

Well I kinda liked them more flat to be honest... with the dual spinning mills working over the entire surface instead of the punctual drills they are going to be soon.

I already wonder how weird the animation will look like when Speed Beaconing the crap out of them with 2000%+ or more speedup from bobs mods etc. Will most likely look like a highspeed jackhammer then. The speeded up animation will definitely be something the old design will have excelled better at.

And let's face it: assembling machines with lots of belts and inserters are also waaay more convoluted than the old clean mining posts.

I just hope that the assembling machine redesign will go in the same direction with more movable parts and more structure to the machine – rather than just a simple block trying to look complicated.

Well I am looking forward to the assembling machine redesign for a long time already if there is even going to be one. Because honestly from all machines in the game they are the most cheap & crappy looking ones now all while being the ones you have the most of in your base.

[Unknow0059]

I'm not a fan of the redesign. I liked how low the original was, I liked the drill bit, I liked the continuous animation which required no glowy bit to tell you whether it was working or not. I liked that it was a simpler design, too.
Speaking of continuous animation, it was not mentioned in the post why the redesign is not continuous. It just says:

With the new construction of the drill, it has to lift to move around.

Which is not a reason. It's just stating it's necessary. I can't think of any difference between the two designs that make it so one has to be continuous and the other not. Both drills spin and go back and forth horizontally.
About the drill bit, I have never discerned what the drill bit of the burner drill actually looked like until this post. Though I think they should have different drills because one is more advanced than the other.

[Drury]

I like these much more than the old design. Much more rough, violent, and satisfying to watch. The pollution factor is now far more believable. Maybe the drill bit itself could be a bit larger, maybe I'm just insecure though.

The sound is a bit echo-ey when there's multiple of them on the screen, but that's a problem with the current mining drill as well and I don't know of a way to fix that without implementing a way for one entity to play different sounds.

So yeah, seems good

[Florian]

I really like the new design. But somehow it bothers me that the ores suddenly appear on the transport belt now. Before, they came out of motion and onto the transport belt. At least that's what it looked like.

[Drury]

Would it be possible for each tile that just got actually mined to spawn a brief plume of dust particles underneath the miner sprite? A bit like how manual mining already does.

More crucially, would it look good or stupid?

I'm thinking it might be an easy way to give feedback on the mining radius, and maybe could justify it by implying it's the vibrations doing the mining rather than just the drilling itself. Making the whole process look even more violent is a bonus.

[manjhi]

I really like the new design. But somehow it bothers me that the ores suddenly appear on the transport belt now. Before, they came out of motion and onto the transport belt. At least that's what it looked like.

Ore output had no connection to mining animation on the old miner as well. If they did get in sync for a while, it was just a coincidence.

[AlexAegis]

I don't like the redesing.

The old one was a 3*3 entity farming a 5*5 area, with no sign at all how it would reach outside of that 3*3 square. Now, not even that 3*3 is explained as the drill only reaches a 1*3 area in the middle.

Also the drill moves way too frequenly. If anything this should be toned down.