Friday Facts #378 - Trains on another level

[AvengerStar]

This is pretty sick. Think this is also marks the first time we're able to cross bodies of water directly in vanilla without having to either go around or committing to putting down landfill. Barring something else being in the works, of course.

It would be neat if big electric poles also received similar treatment to the rail supports by being one of the only entities that can be placed on water, though that's more of an aesthetic desire than anything, I just don't like having to landfill when I don't need to.

As one of the folks vocal about quality in these forums, I did notice that it is a separate mod package. I don't think this actually addresses anything, at least anything I've brought up, since my beef with quality wasn't its concept, rather its proposed implementation. I'd like to play around with it, particularly its effects on optimizing base building and personal equipment, I just think the means of accessing that content appear quick to stale.

But, much like with the rails from this update, I'll just cross that bridge when I get there. At this point, I can only hope quality gets better post-release.

[FMP_thE_mAd]

Woh great news and great FFF !!!
I'm agree with all your ideas for the 2.0 and DLC ! Factorio will be the ultimate factory game (even if it's already the case...).

Question anyway : robots and train on bridge are at the same high ? If yes, could we see collision between them ?? Would be amazing if we have to manage this too ! Especially with the new robot IA !

[funnystuff97]

Reposting what I posted on Lemmy:

I currently use the rail planner a lot, usually to map out how I want my outposts to look at long distances. If the rail planner, particularly shift + click, is actively looking for rails to snap to, I hope it won't greedily try to snap to rails I don't want it to. I'm sure this was already a consideration, but I just want to make sure that if I have multi-layer train crossings, and I'm trying to plan them out before I actually build them, that I'm able to path out rails behind an elevated rail without the rail planner assuming I want the rail to connect to the elevated rail. I hope that won't be an annoying issue.

[kovarex]

I believe that biters can attack trains on the ramp from the ground. Also, if biters destroy the critical supports, the rails wih not enough support will collapse, including the train on top of it so .... No the train is not unkillable on the elevated rails.

[coppercoil]

Can't wait to start making railway pr0n

[Rebmes]

Very cool! Looking forward to those elevated platforms ppl are mentioning, as well xDDD

[Tertius]

The elevated rails are so beautiful! The way they look and are presented in the FFF totally remind me of the toy trains I played with as a teen. My parents once took an opportunity and bought 4 or 5 moving boxes full of 2nd hand toy train equipment, and I was absorbed with this for years. Wooden plate 1.5m x 3m. Paradise!

[Feather]

What happens if the player exits the train in an elevated railway over water? Instant death?

You just can't exit, simple as that

Any specific reason why you didn't want to add something like a lifebuoy into the game? (moving in this thing is excrutiatingly slow so it literally just prevents the player from dying when coming in contact with water)

[bitbased]

Aha! If you build only elevated rails, then no more splat!

[henke37]

So, how will signals on elevated tracks interact with logic wires?

[elfstone]

You mentioned in to different FFF that it is necessary that trains don't deadlock and ressource production runs smoothly while you're offworld, because you can't fix it.
Will it be possible to fix stuff via satellite view like in SE?

[vizthex]

kinda disappointed they're only gonna be in the expansion, but it's still great to see one of the (many) QoL mods I regularly use be added to the base game.

[TheMax]

You Sirs just sold more then one expansion with this. *slow clapping* *node*

[Criperum]

Kinda little bit sad for me personally. I see intersection intricacies as part of fun. Making it easier takes some part of game from me. Graphics is awesome nevertheless

[Idlemind79]

Officially lost their minds with space and train bridges. Stop. Start working on Factorio 2 using unreal engine 5, slap Satisfactory around.

[coppercoil]

Kinda little bit sad for me personally. I see intersection intricacies as part of fun. Making it easier takes some part of game from me. Graphics is awesome nevertheless

I guess, there will be various "schools" among the players, like "no delivery bots", "no beacons", "no quality" etc. So we'll get "no bridges".

[Tricorius]

Officially lost their minds with space and train bridges. Stop. Start working on Factorio 2 using unreal engine 5, slap Satisfactory around.

Space was the plan from the very start. Go back and read the past FFFs. Like from 1 forward. It’s actually pretty interesting.

[Tallinu]

Holy cow! Are we done with the railway surprises now, or do you have more coming?!

It would be neat if big electric poles also received similar treatment to the rail supports by being one of the only entities that can be placed on water, though that's more of an aesthetic desire than anything, I just don't like having to landfill when I don't need to.

I would like to vehemently second this notion. Having to place little 2x2 patches of landfill in the water, which can't automatically be done via a single blueprint pass and can't be removed (without mods), is ugly, unsatisfying, and unfitting with rail supports that can be simply plopped directly into water with their own concrete base support. Even if you needed a recipe to make an "offshore big electric pole" out of BEP and concrete, I would still wholeheartedly approve!

There are supports for all 8 directions.

This is just going to make it even more painful that while most tracks, including the elevated ones, will have eight angles to choose from -- twice as many as before -- ramps will only have two, half as many as before. I can understand the work involved in making SIXTEEN ramp models (each angle needs two, one ascending and one descending, though six/seven of them are mirror images except for the shadows) would be overwhelming... But can't we even get the old 45 degree angle straightaways to slope up or down? Once all other tracks are able to go in such a wide variety of directions, only being able to go up and down horizontally or vertically is going to feel even more restrictive.

Not to mention it will look ugly as hell when you have an otherwise straight track running diagonally which needs to go over water or some other rail line, so you have to cut out a big section of the diagonal and replace it with an L shape of ramps to get it into the air and then swerve back into line with the original direction, and then another L shape to get it back on the ground on the other side...

"Please, sir, may I have some more?" Even if it's just the 45 degree ramps, since most long diagonal rail lines are probably going to be at that angle?

I just realised another major question:

If you have quality turned on, but space turned off, does that let you get quality fish from rocket launches of white science?

Or does quality depend on space?

"quality fish"

... what

Would an elevated artillery train be invulnerable?

This is an important question that needs answering.

Also, an elevated arty train over a lake.

It doesn't look like you can elevate stations, and artillery trains don't fire when stopped at signals.

They do fire when sent to a tempory stop with the condition changed to "inventory empty."

Oh, that is fascinating. Good to know!

As a more easily repeatable alternative, a tiny island could be created, just large enough for a station and a ramp. I'm assuming that the rest of the train being up on an elevated spiral wouldn't make a difference as long as the lead locomotive is stopped "at the station"...

I currently use the rail planner a lot, usually to map out how I want my outposts to look at long distances. If the rail planner, particularly shift + click, is actively looking for rails to snap to, I hope it won't greedily try to snap to rails I don't want it to. I'm sure this was already a consideration, but I just want to make sure that if I have multi-layer train crossings, and I'm trying to plan them out before I actually build them, that I'm able to path out rails behind an elevated rail without the rail planner assuming I want the rail to connect to the elevated rail. I hope that won't be an annoying issue.

Currently you can fully control the orientation of the ending track by hitting the rotate key, and as soon as you've done that once, the rail planner locks to that direction even as you move the mouse around, looking for the right place to aim for it to give you the shape you want. Hopefully that behavior will still work as before, and will prevent the new "snap-to" behavior as soon as you've done any rotation of the track.

And while I'm on the rail planner subject, when you're trying to place tracks without robots (Yes, I know, but you do get trains first, long before personal roboports), the current two rail planner modes are very limiting. Placing a blueprint for a bunch of curves is only slightly helpful because you still have to go back over all of it, clicking on tracks section by section to actually put down real rails. The extremely limited range of the non-ghost placement mode, meanwhile, makes it very frustrating to try to use while trying to get any sort of curve to line up in the right place with two other track endpoints. And I can only see this getting worse with the increase in the number of possible directions a track can go. Even if you're standing right smack in the middle of where it's going to place the pieces, there's a hard cap on what length of track it will place at one time.

I can see a couple of reasonable solutions to this. The easiest would be to just significantly increase the length of track it will let you manually place at a time. It's not like you'd be able to gain any useful combat advantage that would "unbalance the game" when playing with biters by being able to slap down tracks a greater distance from your character, and it would make early game rail building dramatically less frustrating.

Alternatively (or maybe even additionally), make it so that clicking on a rail ghost with an empty hand and then dragging (using the button that does not mine things, obviously, whichever you have that bound to) would start "filling in" any ghost rails you wave your mouse pointer over, as long as they're within placement range (though it would still be really helpful to expand that for rails). You'd just walk around along the tracks you'd laid out and swipe them into existence, plo-plo-plo-plop! This would still be somewhat manual, as you'd have to make sure to point at every bit of ghost track and not miss any, but the rail endcaps would show you any breaks where you'd missed a spot so as long as you're paying attention it wouldn't be a problem. But it would have the advantage of being a fairly easy and, I think, fairly satisfying approach, much better than the fiddly "do it all over again except much more difficult than the first time" method that you currently have to use.

This "start clicking on a ghost and swipe around to fill them in at the correct locations" approach would also be incredibly useful for placing little fiddly bits like inserters where you've already laid out ghosts. When building rows of machines, I usually create the layout first as ghosts (whether via blueprint or copy-pasting something I whip up on the spot) and then put in all the parts manually (until I have robots of course), but any time there are gaps between the inserters lined up alongside the machines, or different types of inserters, or inserters pointing in different directions, or power poles mixed in, etc, getting them all placed accurately without overwriting the wrong inserters is just hell. Even stutter-stepping with no exoskeletons, all those tiny corrective precision mouse motions lead to hand cramps galore!

But I've already laid out where things should go. Why should we have to go through all the hassle of picking things off the hotbar (or pressing Q this, Q that, Q something else constantly), rotating them around, and carefully placing things so that they match up with the already-placed ghosts? Why not just click on the ghost to place the correct item? Makes perfect sense to me. (And there's semi-related precedent in that you can already just drag your mouse across an entire row of machines to insert or remove items from them.)

"Oh, no! Can't do that, or what's the point of bots?" Hah! Yeah right, bots will always be way easier than doing this! And manual placement would still be range limited. It's not even a contest.
"Oh, but speedrunners!" What speedrunner would waste time laying out blueprints before placing the patterns they've memorized anyway?

This would be basically a really good accessibility feature, or something along the lines of Kovarex's "Why doesn't the rail planner just snap to the rail you're pointing at?" ease-of-use feature.


Sorry for the branching tangent -- if there's a place the idea needs to go to be considered I can move it.

[mowfax]

I am also very excited, this makes the waiting game feel even longer. Also I saw many questions that were answered in the factorio discord. This was pinned there earlier:

[FluxBob]

this is overdrive. I love it