Rafe wrote: Mon Nov 11, 2024 6:57 pm
One of my favorite mods. I don't think you need the player character at all as you are the factory. The canon in my head has always been that the direction of factory growth is done by an advanced AI or that a post-human has forgone his humanity and fused with technology and his entire being and identity is embodied as the factory in some unseen mainframe or maybe still in orbit. The belts being like his circulatory system, the steam valves and pistons being his lungs, the little bots flying around being his hands to the radar dishes being his eyes and ears.
The reason I was thinking about having your character "up in space" on an inescapable platform is technical.
Factorio 2.0 has fixed everything that was a major challenge for BNW in 1.0. There were a lot of things in 1.0 that can only be done by your character. And so BNW in 1.0 uses "god mode" to have what is effectively a character with no sprite. This is what allows you to drive vehicles, and why 1.0 BNW, internally, has a bunch of code to try to make sure only a select few items end up in your "inventory" because you can only manipulate these items as a character.
So, effectively, you have a character in BNW, you just can't see it, and there's a bunch of code to prevent you from carrying anything but modules and a few other things in your inventory.
But in Factorio 2.0, you can manipulate everything through the map view if you want to. So, there's no reason to make the character disappear. You can just confine the character.
But, for you, that would break what made the mod most interesting.
See, I was thinking that you were someone sent to exploit the resources of a star system only glimpsed through telescopes, and you weren't given the hazard equipment you would need to actually land on them in favor of a remote controlled bunch of machines that had much wider environmental tolerances than even you could in a hazard suit of some kind.
Hmmm.... so, it sounds like for the mod to be as interesting to people I will still have to remove the character.
There is another issue... I have ideas for how to make the mod compatible with space age. For example, constructing a "landing pack" that had all the stuff you needed to land on your chosen planet. The components would be the roboports, chests, and walls that would be deployed and there would be trigger code that when a cargo pod with a landing pack landed, it would auto-deploy into a BNW starting base.
But, some planets would have peculiar requirements for your landing pack. For example, on Fulgura, there is no way to have a roboport network that spans the map because you can't build on the oil covered ground or in the oil ocean. I'd have to add a special kind of landfill that let you do that in order for BNW to work.
And I think Aquila will pose some unique challenges as well that will make things hard for BNW.
I'm doing a full Space Age playthrough while I think about this.
BTW, BNW isn't "my mod". I've been basically given it by the original author (
canidae). But he deserves most of the credit. Almost all of the code in it is his at this point.