your thoughts on menu simulation

[pichutarius]

my thoughts:

1. too bombastic
its a glorified wallpaper, and should be quiet and not be distracting. what's on screen should be slow. i like scene with assembly line, belts, bots, trains arriving and leaving base, but not combats (a little is ok) and spidertron moving around. showing nests and biters loitering around is ok.

2. too short.
i would prefer each scene to last 1~5 mins, every time player enters the menu they will see different startup screen, different surprise every time. zipping by every 10 seconds is distracting. a good example is default window wallpaper that rotates every 30mins.

3. potential spoiler?
if I'm a new player, i wouldn't wanna see spidertron on the screen and being teased for 100 hours. i prefered to be surprised, just like how the spidertron was implemented.

anyway overall still cooler than a static image, thumbs up from me.

i'm not putting it on the suggestion (yet) because others might have different taste bud. what's your thought on the menu simulation?

[valneq]

I just love em!

Just find it weird that I can hear them when in new game map preview, where I cannot see a single bit of the simulations.

[pichutarius]

I just love em!

Just find it weird that I can hear them when in new game map preview, where I cannot see a single bit of the simulations.

yes agreed, i should add one more point, mute sounds.

[NotRexButCaesar]

I like everything, but would prefer it a bit quieter too. Not muted but faded at least.

[Deadlock989]

I'm surprisingly negative towards it. I was really looking forward to it and thought it was a really clever idea when I read about it. I had even designed some furniture to include in modded screens. Now I'm looking at muting it as much as possible. Fortunately the modding interface is straightforward.

1. It's way too combat and biter focused. It doesn't represent the game I typically play. I don't think Factorio is well represented by hails of artillery and fountains of purple gore. That said I'm amused by the one that which showcases how OP personal laser defence is.

2. It looks too much like the game. I keep trying to zoom out with the mouse wheel and trying to use Esc to make the menu go away so I can play it. The vignette is a clue but it's too subtle.

3. It just plows on regardless even if mod changes have made the scenario goofy-looking or even simply unviable. So now modders have more work to do in cleaning up broken menu simulations.

4. Agree with others that the looping sounds are unwelcome.

[NotRexButCaesar]

1. It's way too combat and biter focused. It doesn't represent the game I typically play. I don't think Factorio is well represented by hails of artillery and fountains of purple gore. That said I'm amused by the one that which showcases how OP personal laser defence is.

I agree

2. It looks too much like the game. I keep trying to zoom out with the mouse wheel and trying to use Esc to make the menu go away so I can play it. The vignette is a clue but it's too subtle.

I also agree: maybe it should be a little blurry

3. It just plows on regardless even if mod changes have made the scenario goofy-looking or even simply unviable.

I disagree: it is the mods job to fix that.

[Koub]

I globally like it, but also globally agree with some of Deadlock989's gripes.
1. Content too much combat oriented. I'm expecting to see an accurate representation of average gameplay, so mostly factory content, and a few combat scenes. Watching this makes me think Factorio is overall a combat game sprinkled with a little building. Special mention to the 1 biter poursuit, I liked it a lot .

2. I think something to make the cutscenes less crisp would be welcome, a slight blur (like the one we see behind the reserarch menu), or maybe an "old movie" overall effect

3. I can't say

4. I like the sound, but I think its volume may be slightly off. I think it could be a little lower, but maybe it is because there's a lot of combat, which is overall more noisy that gives me the impression. The parts with just trains or factory seem OK.

5. The music doesn't seem to loop, if one stays long on the menu, all what's left is the animation sound.

[ptx0]

I'm surprisingly negative towards it. I was really looking forward to it and thought it was a really clever idea when I read about it. I had even designed some furniture to include in modded screens. Now I'm looking at muting it as much as possible. Fortunately the modding interface is straightforward.

1. It's way too combat and biter focused. It doesn't represent the game I typically play. I don't think Factorio is well represented by hails of artillery and fountains of purple gore. That said I'm amused by the one that which showcases how OP personal laser defence is.

2. It looks too much like the game. I keep trying to zoom out with the mouse wheel and trying to use Esc to make the menu go away so I can play it. The vignette is a clue but it's too subtle.

3. It just plows on regardless even if mod changes have made the scenario goofy-looking or even simply unviable. So now modders have more work to do in cleaning up broken menu simulations.

4. Agree with others that the looping sounds are unwelcome.

i don't think many here will be surprised, lol

1. the default settings enable enemies

2. that's sorta the point

3. 'fortunately the modding interface is straightfoward' -> krastorio2 has a static image (and their own music..)

4. a mute button would be nice, next to language selector dropdown (remember previous setting)

[astroshak]

I like it, a lot.

I’d love to actually make it my PC’s desktop wallpaper.

[Serenity]

I like the scenes, though I agree that there is too much combat. But there shouldn't be sound. It's very distracting

[MiniHerc]

my thoughts:

1. too bombastic
its a glorified wallpaper, and should be quiet and not be distracting. what's on screen should be slow. i like scene with assembly line, belts, bots, trains arriving and leaving base, but not combats (a little is ok) and spidertron moving around. showing nests and biters loitering around is ok.

+1

2. too short.
i would prefer each scene to last 1~5 mins, every time player enters the menu they will see different startup screen, different surprise every time. zipping by every 10 seconds is distracting. a good example is default window wallpaper that rotates every 30mins.

+1

3. potential spoiler?
if I'm a new player, i wouldn't wanna see spidertron on the screen and being teased for 100 hours. i prefered to be surprised, just like how the spidertron was implemented.

Or a teaser. Makes one more excited to get there. You can always browse the tech tree at any time even as a day 1 player and see the spidertron research.


My thoughts are that there should be four buttons at the bottom: Pause the simulation shuffle (stay on that one), Previous simulation, Next simulation, and Mute the simulation sound (but let the music keep going).

[TatsuZZMage]

Well personaly i have a favorite cause in my head I can hear the pac-man level transition music playing when the player is chasing a biter from one end to the other only to be chased back by a swarm ^_^

[pichutarius]

Or a teaser. Makes one more excited to get there. You can always browse the tech tree at any time even as a day 1 player and see the spidertron research.

but it is backward, instead of seeing actual thing then research icon, i'd rather see research icon then actual thing. plus a new player will not actively search for spidertron, suddenly found it in the research is also a surprise

[5thHorseman]

I'm a super huge fan of it, though I think it should go away (i.e. no noise) when you're starting a new game.

[Pi-C]

2. too short.
i would prefer each scene to last 1~5 mins, every time player enters the menu they will see different startup screen, different surprise every time. zipping by every 10 seconds is distracting. a good example is default window wallpaper that rotates every 30mins.

I absolutely agree with this, albeit for an entirely different reason: As Deadlock pointed out, each time a scene is loaded, all Lua migration scripts of every active mods that have at least one such script will be run. Previously, it didn't really matter if you put debugging code into your migration scripts because they were run just once when a game was loaded. Logging stuff would be actually useful because you could see what was happening and use that information to fix potential problems. Now it's different. If you start Factorio and keep the start menu open for a while, your log file may be spammed with the same output very fast (depending on how many mods with migration scripts are active). This isn't really helpful at all, quite to the contrary!

For example, while working on updating my mods, I noticed that there was a bug in one of my changelogs. This wouldn't have been a big deal previously as there would be a useful error message right at the bottom of my log file and I could easily fix the bug. It wasn't there now, however -- I had to scroll way up until I could find it, and I missed it because it was just one line buried under a heap of output from continuously running migration scripts!

Also, it did happen several times already that I introduced bugs that I needed to fix with migration scripts that changed all entities of a certain kind on all surfaces, for all forces. No problem if the script is run just once -- but if it's run each time a new scene is loaded, this is really bad and may slow down things a lot. So, letting each scene run for a couple of minutes instead just some seconds would actually improve performance.

[bormand]

I love those dynamic wallpapers!

But I see some problems with them:

1. As other people mention, scenes are too combat-oriented. Hope to see more scenes with peaceful machinery.

2. Switching between scenes is very abrupt. Light cross-fade or fade-out effect wouldn't harm.

3. Scenes that highlight working factories should be much longer, imho. Some of them are so short, that I don't have enough time to understand what happens.

[ptx0]

[...]Previously, it didn't really matter if you put debugging code into your migration scripts[...]

there's actually an option to disable them, that i just discovered. just like disabling which mods touched a certain prototype for debugging startup speed.

[Pi-C]

[...]Previously, it didn't really matter if you put debugging code into your migration scripts[...]

there's actually an option to disable them, that i just discovered. just like disabling which mods touched a certain prototype for debugging startup speed.

You're right! I've looked at all the menus multiple times last night. Still, this one setting has been very successful in evading my sight. I blame it on binge-modding throughout the night while trying not to fall asleep …

While this setting is the answer to the problems I've described earlier, I still maintain that running all migration scripts on loading a scene is a waste of computing power and, possibly, disk space. So I'm very happy that @Rseding already fixed this for the next current release! I could even imagine adding a scene of my own at some point in the future -- would be a nice way to showcase stuff.

[ickputzdirwech]

I always try to press alt

[Pi-C]

I always try to press alt

Don't you ever succeed?