Factorio Forums

The generator type supports having a burner, but there is no way to have a clear on-off state for the entity.

For the base game entities this is OK as they are not burning fuel, they are using steam, and the animation speed is enough of an indicator.

For anything with a burner however, if you have any kind of lighting effect in the entity sprites and the animation stops it looks like the entity is still running.

Other machines either use a working visualisation or idle animation for this, so can either of these be enabled for the generator type? Working visualisations have the advantage or allowing additional lighting effects so they would be preferred.

Yes please. +++1

Also mining drills, same use case - burner drills with a furnace glow or electric drills with indicator lights.

I don't think this is very likely to happen (I'm no graphics guy though), so I want to point you to https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/EnergyS ... ht_flicker which should hopefully help with indications of the working state.

Bilka wrote: Sun May 12, 2019 9:17 am I don't think this is very likely to happen (I'm no graphics guy though), so I want to point you to https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/EnergyS ... ht_flicker which should hopefully help with indications of the working state.

Yeah, we asked for mining drills before, and posila wasn't very enthused by it, as there is no vanilla use case. But it would greatly expand the options available to modders if drills and generators could have more parity with assemblers and furnaces. Better options for modders = better mods = more sales of the base game, albeit in a very indirect relationship.

The flickering light certainly helps - except during the day when it basically doesn't. Also, it niggles me that the light isn't really coming from anything that looks like it might be a light source. You can't have anything that looks like a light or a burner on an electric generator/drill, because when the generator stops moving, the lights just freeze in place, powered or not, burning or not.

As Bilka said - this isn't likely to happen. Assembling machines/furnaces have extra state data to make it work with them and we aren't going to be adding extra state data to entities just for visual logic just for modding support.

I added idle_animation and animation support to the burner generator for the next version.