Friday Facts #379 - Abstract rewiring

[Molay]

Not the most flashy FFF, but a good and interesting for sure! It's always amazing to see how much attention is paid to and work dedicated towards improving the little things. I'm very happy to see wiring become a remote-tool, I love doing stuff remotely ever since I got used to the satellite view in space exploration, and that foreshadowing of next weeks FFF has me really excited.

But yes, the humble wire, it's nice to see it get some love. I didn't see anything wrong with it before, but the comparison pictures make it feel a lot tighter in 2.0 from what I can see. The 5 wire connection limit was also a bit of a pain with carelessly made blueprints. I ended up with a couple intersections that were not connected to the electric grid by adding a T-intersection to a piece of straight rail afterwards, just by virtue of having exhausted all the wire connections before placing it! That should take care of such little mishaps as well

[Amarula]

I always enjoy the glimpses of the development process, and oh I feel your pain "In other words, we built a whole infrastructure to shield this logic from change, while the infrastructure was so overwhelmingly more complicated than just changing the original logic. We thought it was a good programming design, but it led us down the wrong path."
Looking forward to the great new abstract entities and really enjoying the ending 'so the code got refactored and lived happily ever after...'

[Zeblote]

My bug report is fixed! After 9 years!!!

> Can you spot the shadow problem I want to fix next?
Multiple overlapping shadows get darker?

[yblondinca]

You can close my bug report from 2017 too:

viewtopic.php?f=29&t=49532&p=287558#p287558

Thanks for finally addressing the 5 connection limit!

[Dev-iL]

Am I the only one bothered by these bits of shadow?

[Hares]

1. Great changes, really what I've been waiting for (even more than train ramps and robots AI improvement)
2. I do like the concept of making more entities abstract, but it seems a bit weird for some of them to be placed in the inventory
3. The Spidertron Remote is, however, required to be placeable in the inventory as having them connected to the different Spidertrons is an actual use-case.

[mward]

I can remember when the pickaxe and steel pickaxe were real entities

[Panzerknacker]

Great job with the wiring system and the shadows, it is an improvement for sure. Not a huge fan of adding more UI elements to the game tho, I actually liked how many craftable items in the game actually had use cases for them on right click instead of just being an ingredient.

[conn11]

A great and needed addition.
So next time we will hear about remote interaction and repice setting?
Also renaming trainstops without loosing conditions would indeed be great.

[adam_bise]

Thank you for the ability to rewire circuit connections remotely. It was always tedious to have to copy, paste by my feet, rewire, copy and paste remotely. This is a nice QoL addition!

The wires and shadows look good. Honestly, I never noticed anything wrong with them before.

[pointa2b]

Its interesting to read about the various facets of the game get refinement and polish. The expansion is already looking to be a beast, and we've barely even delved into the FFF's for the next year.

And thanks for the hint for what the next FFF will contain, you guys should do that more often!

[Daandriks]

Nice one again!

I hope in the end that they simplify how the circuit network works. I come along a bit, but it gets complicated pretty quickly. When it comes to latch and all that stuff my mind just don’t understand it.

More like a computer that has a drag and drop like If this chest had less then X iron then fetch train to station x. It is doable with the signals. But my mind is frying when doing al of these kind of stuff with the circuit network.

If they do it with mods it could be like a mod you could turn on or off. So people who understand them could still use it the old way.

[aka13]

I notice the droopy combinator wires all the time, and I like this change.

For aesthetic reasons I would ask for a way to wire things at ground level, without going up to pole level, only to go back down again. But it already exists: a wooden box with all slots limited. I keep forgetting this, and should use it more.

This is for the f2p combinator contraptions. Premium combinator contraptions have to use steel chests for unification purposes.

[MEOWMI]

Got to love the attention to detail!

The wire hanging jankiness was something I always thought was just gonna be part of the game. It looked silly and wrong, but it's a small thing and game graphics always involve these kinds of concessions. I am impressed how well you corrected these problems.

[FuryoftheStars]

RIP https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WireShortcuts

Probably RIP for this, too: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GetWiresBack

Which was my preference over further abstraction (of the wires, at least), but alas, it was not meant to be. They have gone the way of the pickaxe, which I guess I can say I'm not surprised about. Oh well. Not a huge deal. I just hope that they don't "abstract" and simplify too many things.

[FutureSpec]

Nice update. Any chance we could see an improvement to messy wires and remove the need for mods like Power Grid Comb? Right now, when you place a new pole, you sometimes get bizarre, diagonal extra wires. It creates tedious rework for people who like a neat power wires setup.

[Zaflis]

I really like FFFs regardless of the impact on the gameplay. Please keep posting!

So mod Power Grid Comb to stay, hope it won't be broken due to these internal changes.

You cannot break something that is already broken I had to uninstall Power Grid Comb after unfortunately seeing it's really not tidying up my powerpoles as i expected.

[vedrit]

PRAISES BE! The wire nightmare is over!

[Rebmes]

don't stop now, I'm not sure the "remotes" should even be "remotes" at all now that they are abstract.

How about a button for activating the energy shield, for example? Why bother with a "remote"?

Also thank you for the blog post and taking us along for the journey <3

[picklock]

Another FFF with interesting information.
No longer wasting materials when wireing amnually.