Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Artillery shell trajectories should follow a ballistic arc, instead of flying parallel to the ground.

What?

Now, I understand that perspective in Factorio is wonky by design, but I still believe that this issue can be resolved. My (poorly drawn) idea is as follows:
- Marked in green: The "true" path of the which is displayed on the map - the map should stay as it is, straight line.
- Marked in blue: The visual path of the shell and the marked centerpoint.

The shell visible in the regular, non-map view should be visually offset in the "up"/"north" direction by a certain distance. In the marked centerpoint it should reach appropriate maximum which would depend on the distance of the shot, while the beginning (barrel) and the end (impact point) are offset by zero, and everything in between gradually arcs between those values.

Bonus point: the shell should gradually rotate to follow the arc instead of being oriented the same way the whole flight.
Old forum post on related topic, there also was some discussion on the flat trajectory, and there was a mention of trajectory potentially being updated:

posila wrote: Tue Jan 16, 2018 1:03 pm The shadow will be aligned properly in 0.16.17
I'll look into trajectory of the projectile ... sometime in future

Sadly, nothing came of it so far, so I post to remind of this minor visual annoyance. And just for brevity, I will mention blogpost which announced this feature first: fff-345

Why?

As in the title: shells exiting the barrel at an impossible angle break my immersion quite badly which is a shame, because otherwise watching my artillery thunder away is extremely satisfying