Friday Facts #268 - The modern Biter

[Nexarius]

0.17 no news?

Will it be ready for christmas?

[5thHorseman]

I was going to come on here and joke about how this was a terrible change and I hated it and it turns out a half dozen people beat me to it. Now I won't bother it just won't be funny.

[Mike5000]

Shrug

[0mega]

To get the 'feel sorry' effect just replace the biters by cats. Innocent cute cats that just walk around the factory and accidentally break stuff, clawing on the assemblers, knocking thing off of belts, climbing on the inserters etc. Now THAT may make you 'feel pity' when putting them on fire.

[Gebus]

0.17 no news?

Will it be ready for christmas?

Just calling attention to this. I don't easily claim supporters are owed anything, but a roadmap would be nice. At the moment there is a new update every week that isn't very interesting from a game-play perspective.

[Light]

It still looks like it belongs on a plate.

[dood]

Those are the most moe biters ever.
Subarashi.

[maddoctor]

make a flying biter

[Cazadore]

please for the love of the only true god, make biter death gory/splatty... and varied that a killing zone in front of the walls dont look like a modern art installation.

thanks. otherwise nice work on the redesign.

[Oktokolo]

I played some Redmew multiplayer scenarios including one similar to that presented in the video. In that scenario, the world was a cave system of impenetrable rock filled with mineable rocks wich contained random amounts of all ores/coal/stone. There where no cave-ins but biters spawned randomly when mining rocks and in dark areas (so you had to build lamps everywhere). It was fun to play and inspired me to try out DivOresity for my current vanilla+QoL-mods playthrough.


The new biters look good.

But game mechanics can't be fixed by just making the sprites look better.
You need to convince the devs that biter AI needs improvements.
The biter AI pulls out players from immersion hard. They are fine when attacking your base. But when the player attacks their bases, it gets ridiculous. They don't use any tactics and as their insane respawn rate obsoletes player tactics, most (like me) just slow-push through nests guns blazing or do the lame offensive turret lines. The artificial reduction of usefull tactics by the respawn mechanics makes biter bases the most boring aspect of the game.

Also, the game's only answer to not wanting to go the genocide way are "stop playing" or turning the biters off (wich also obsoletes a big part of the tech tree).
Factorio does not let you go green to stop biter pollution-based attacks.
It does not let you get new resources or building space without killing biters.
It does not let players prevent biter expansion without killing.

There is no sense in wanting the player to feel bad for killing biters as long as Factorio in its core is a USA simulator. The game literally is about invading foreign grounds, transforming all resources into an ever-growing military-industrial complex - and slaughtering the natives on the go. It is probably the most american game ever made.
You really want the players to feel pity about killing biters? Make them look like native americans, because that is their role in the game - but expect sales to drop significantly as players in general don't like their genocide simulators to be too realistic...

That said: It is okay for a game to be a genocide simulator. It is just a game after all. And i like playing killer games too.
You do not have to do the ethical gaming thing. But if you want to try it, at least also try to give players the choice to play in an ethical way if they want to. Only including ethics to make players stop playing seems to be a bad design choice to me...

[redinator2000]

Hmm I think the Factorio planet needs a proper name: Factorium? Factination? Factinogo?
None of these seem quite right, I'll be interested to see what creative ideas the community generates

Something like "Oreo". You add the factory.

[Reika]

please for the love of the only true god, make biter death gory/splatty... and varied that a killing zone in front of the walls dont look like a modern art installation.

thanks. otherwise nice work on the redesign.

No. You want blood and gore, go play shoot-em-up-9000 or movie-theater-shooter-fanboy-the-game. Do not pollute every other game irrespective of the fact that there are a lot of us who do NOT want to deal with such things.

[J-H]

Can we please get some better error-reporting for trains?

"No Path" is not helpful with a long train path involving multiple intersections and a dozen signals. Walking the train path twice and seeing a bunch of green lights (NO red ones) means there should not be anything wrong.

The train error reporting needs to include a map marker for the area that's having an error (like we get from biter attacks).
A "robot beep" style notification for "A train is stuck" would be good too.

[rantingrodent]

0.17 no news?

Will it be ready for christmas?

Just calling attention to this. I don't easily claim supporters are owed anything, but a roadmap would be nice. At the moment there is a new update every week that isn't very interesting from a game-play perspective.

Game developers never know these things for certain. Some of them choose to gamble by committing to various dates despite the fact that they are eternally shrugging in their minds. Be glad that Wube doesn't commit to guessed dates just to satisfy our impatience. This way you'll never have to face the disappointment of inevitable delays and missed dates.

[rantingrodent]

A "robot beep" style notification for "A train is stuck" would be good too.

Hmm they announced this for running out of fuel already in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-253 but didn't explicitly say it was also in place for being stuck.

[Oktokolo]

"No Path" is not helpful with a long train path involving multiple intersections and a dozen signals.

Pathfinders in general try to walk a graph from A to B (or the other way round) trying multiple paths. If they do not find a way from A to B, they only know, that there is no path - not why there is no path. But...

For signaling errors, it would be possible to repeatedly try finding a path while ignoring N (with N starting at 1 and incremented after each try) signals on the way until a path has been found or N got too big (5 might be a good limit) and on success report the ignored signals as error locations. That would be a real help for me as my pathing errors mostly are caused by a low amount (most often just one) of misplaced signals.

For rail connection issues, they could find rails that are dead ends overlapped by a curved rail and count them as connected together on retry. Whenever i have a pathing error, wich is not caused by a misplaced signal, it always is, because i thought curves connect to other curves or straight rails while they don't.

Pathing errors are a rare thing and the runtime cost of both methods for actual error detection are not that high (for small N in first method).
But someone would have to code the detection. They are currently polishing a lot of stuff and the coders are probably optimizing the hell out of the engine currently. And ofter release they have to work on the next big thing. So i am not expecting them to actually implement it.

[Zavian]

Pathing errors are a rare thing and the runtime cost of both methods for actual error detection are not that high (for small N in first method).
But someone would have to code the detection.

But adding an alert that a train is "no pathing" should be relatively easy.

[Reika]

A "robot beep" style notification for "A train is stuck" would be good too.

cough mods cough


https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AutoTrainDepot

[RobertTerwilliger]

You shouldn't really bother with comprehension to biters. While playing Diablo 3 I never had pity in "fairy" semi-secret level to that pink ponies or unicorns, or whatever-it-was (don't remember exactly - was quite a while ago). I was just annoyed by absurdness of what was happening. I bet that was reaction of most players.
So, once again, the more cute bad guys are - the more annoying result is.

PS. Sure, the real classic understanding of being "bad" is player's role - he is an invader who destroys and massacres, but "good" and "bad" are relevant terms: "good" is one on your side, and "bad" is your rival, no matter what. Nazis didn't consider themselves "bad", right?)

[Avezo]

I think the biggest problem with biters is that there are barely 2 types of them. With more, gameplay against them would be more interesting IMO.