Friday Facts #393 - Putting things on top of other things

[Neutronium]

Consider the color orange for the new bulk inserters. Its a sportier color, indicative of its performance.

[Neutronium]

duplicate message please remove

[WIZ4]

This is what I've been waiting for since Friday Facts #225, when I posted this GIF
And I'm glad that it will be implemented

Stack-belt.gif (23.21 MiB) Viewed 4900 times

[SteveMacGyver]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.
Even with the coloring trick applied, it is something I'd actively avoid in the factory due to the graphics if it remains like this.
The screens I have watched this on are 30 Hz, 60 Hz and 120 Hz bytheway, eventhough the rendering was always done by MS Edge. I hope the ingame looks different, but in the current state it isn't something I look forward to, despite the amazeballsness of the new feature.
To close off the comment: The stacking feature is very, very cool and I do look forward to using that.
The factory must grow.

[Shimohi]

Now I just need a belt wedge that shoves items from one side of the belt to the other and my life would be perfect.

[Ext3h]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.

Because the GIF is only 24fps or less, I suppose? It's skipping half the frames, and items are jumping much further than they should.

And it's also NOT helping that "packed" belts completely clash with stacked belts to turn into pure pixel noise at this point.

[SteveMacGyver]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.

Because the GIF is only 24fps or less, I suppose? It's skipping half the frames, and items are jumping much further than they should.

And it's also NOT helping that "packed" belts completely clash with stacked belts to turn into pure pixel noise at this point.

I 100% hope that that's the case, because this is making me nauseous.

[JackTheSpades]

Now we just need actual fast long inserters and we are in logistic heaven.

[adam_bise]

Wow!! Another game changer!! OMG OMG OMGZZ~~!!!1

[Ext3h]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.

Because the GIF is only 24fps or less, I suppose? It's skipping half the frames, and items are jumping much further than they should.

And it's also NOT helping that "packed" belts completely clash with stacked belts to turn into pure pixel noise at this point.

I 100% hope that that's the case, because this is making me nauseous.

This will arguably also be an issue ingame. If you can't do stable 60fps, you will suffer just the same.

There's a little known design rule, that entities (including their associated "padding") must NEVER jump more than half their width in a single frame, or otherwise you MUST include tracers / motion blur to correctly provide a sense of motion - INSTEAD of a clear, unblurred texture.

And a 60 ips belt has violated that rule even at full 60fps. Negative padding (from over-packing) + moving to fast is an especially bad combination.

[SteveMacGyver]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.

Because the GIF is only 24fps or less, I suppose? It's skipping half the frames, and items are jumping much further than they should.

And it's also NOT helping that "packed" belts completely clash with stacked belts to turn into pure pixel noise at this point.

I 100% hope that that's the case, because this is making me nauseous.

This will arguably also be an issue ingame. If you can't do stable 60fps, you will suffer just the same.

There's a little known design rule, that entities (including their associated "padding") must NEVER jump more than half their width in a single frame, or otherwise you MUST include tracers / motion blur to correctly provide a sense of motion - INSTEAD of a clear, unblurred texture.

And a 60 ips belt has violated that rule even at full 60fps. Negative padding (from over-packing) + moving to fast is an especially bad combination.

Always interesting to read about the mechanics behind these things. Thanks for teaching me something new today!

[picklock]

Great news again. I like the color of the new belt. I find brighter colors as requested in some posts and as I have already seen them on some mods disturbing.

The new inserters are also cool. Wube has finally managed to make it so that many of my previous blueprints have to be recreated.

Since only the expansion was mentioned in the blog post when exploring, it would be interesting to know if the new inserters and the new belt are also available in version 2.0 without activated expansion?

[mmmPI]

There's a little known design rule, that entities (including their associated "padding") must NEVER jump more than half their width in a single frame, or otherwise you MUST include tracers / motion blur to correctly provide a sense of motion - INSTEAD of a clear, unblurred texture.

And a 60 ips belt has violated that rule even at full 60fps. Negative padding (from over-packing) + moving to fast is an especially bad combination.

I think 60 item per second on belt correspond exactly to moving half an item width per frame, the rule is respected.

A belt is subdivided in 256 "positions" and an item occupy 64 of them. This is why a full belt is 8 items, 4x64 on each side.

Now if we consider 60 item per second, how fast are item moving on the belt, to me goes as follow : (60/2) because there are 2 lanes gives you 30, that's the number of item that goes through 1 side of the belt, 30 items have a length of 30*64= 1920 belts positions, for which they have 60 ticks, which means items moves 1920/60 = 32 belt position per ticks, and item being 64 position wide, they are moving exactly half their width in a single frame.


( the mp4 when downloaded and inspected is composed of 250 images and displayed in 5 second, so that makes it 50 images per second which may be the cause of other visual artifact, but the design rules would be respected with 60 ips belts i think )

[Haisom]

If we have to have stack inserters and bulk inserters, they are named backward. The stack inserter should stack things and the bulk inserter should move more items. I don't think I like either the new inserter or the faster belts. I love the view of perfectly compressed belts, this... is just a mess to look at. I don't like it. I do like the removal of the filter inserters. They were a pain to manage.

[Big_Snarly]

I have to honestly say that the 60ips belt is absolutely unwatchable, both with items on it and without. I literally hurts my eyes and not in a good way.

Because the GIF is only 24fps or less, I suppose? It's skipping half the frames, and items are jumping much further than they should.

And it's also NOT helping that "packed" belts completely clash with stacked belts to turn into pure pixel noise at this point.

I 100% hope that that's the case, because this is making me nauseous.

This will arguably also be an issue ingame. If you can't do stable 60fps, you will suffer just the same.

There's a little known design rule, that entities (including their associated "padding") must NEVER jump more than half their width in a single frame, or otherwise you MUST include tracers / motion blur to correctly provide a sense of motion - INSTEAD of a clear, unblurred texture.

And a 60 ips belt has violated that rule even at full 60fps. Negative padding (from over-packing) + moving to fast is an especially bad combination.

Good to see this already commented on. While gameplay wise, the changes are sounding great, the bulk inserter and logistics sounds like an improvement, but when I saw the next tier belt, my eyes began to hurt. Tried with and without glasses just to make sure.

After looking at the tier 4 belt animations, I think what was making it so jarring was the belt segments are too close together, creating the trippy effect. I don't know if the solution would be to make larger belt segments. That might make sense for visual ease on the eyes, but it wouldn't make sense for how a belt "should look" for it to operate as such.

The items going down the belt was also very quick, and I can't tell if that was a problem or if it was because it was on an animated belt with too many lines visually animated.

I wish I had a good idea to suggest, but most sound too sci-fi or over the top to make sense in the factorio world building.

Although, one odd thought I had was pallet driver bots. I'm sure many have seen warehouses on some tech tv show, where they have robots that look like roombas on steroids. They slide under a pallet, jack up, and travel to their destination. The thought of making a traveling path like we do with belts, but it's just guard rails, with pallets that practically glide along the ground could be an interesting idea.

Biggest issue with this would be around turns probably. But if the output is still superior to a tier 3 belt, seeing a delay as a pallet navigates a turn before the next pallet goes into a turn wouldn't be an issue.

[coppercoil]

What do splitters consider when balancing: whole stacks or total single items?

[Terrahertz]

All in all a great addition the game and literaly line with the vertical scaling theme going on in the expansion.
Also when the large mining drill was revealed I was wondering how to deal with the gigantic output, especially after several mining productivity upgrades. Guess I now know the answer.

I was just wondering a bit about the math:
With 60 Slots per Second per Belt and 4 Items per Slot, the belt transports around 240 Items/s meaning a Wagon full of ore is emptied within 8.3 seconds. The FFF about quality was not listing what it does to trains in general, can we expect more cargo space in higher quality rolling stock?

Have you tried the effect of motion blur on the new belt? Because I can confirm, looking at the last animation for a while made me a bit dizzy.

So we had direct upgrades for production, trains, belts, inserters and circuits and a generall upgrade to those and other things through quality. The only thing missing so far is: Fluid handling. Got anything in store for us there?

[éclair]

It would be nice if long-inserter had long-fast-inserter and long-stack-inserter, just like inserter has fast-inserter and stack-inserter.

It seems boring that transport-belt, fast-transport-belt, express-transport-belt, and super(?)-express-transport-belt are 1x, 2x, 3x, and 4x faster, respectively.
Is it okay to set each to 1x, 2x, 3x, or 5x speed?
When an even faster transport-belt comes out, it will be 8x, 13x, 21x, etc.

Although it is not directly related to this story, the size of cargo-wagon is 2 x 6 cells and 40 stacks, while steel-chest is 1 x 1 cell and has 48 stacks. Is it not possible to load a chest with luggage on cargo-wagon?


※ "This comment has been automatically translated from another language to English. If you cannot understand the meaning of the comment, please ignore it."

[mmmPI]

• With 60 stacks or slots per second on the new belt, meaning 30 per second per side and 30 fps, how come that in the last animation the stacks are not optically staying in place?

I don't know which way was used to display the image at 30 fps, to me the last image has 60 image per second , unlike the one with just a single fish stack which has 50 images per second, this when downloading the video and looking at the number of images. Maybe that could explain the mystery, the last video to me would just be 2 diferent images without the color randomization.

[NeveHanter]

Wonderful changes! Great work folks as always! At last I wouldn't need to bother with Deadlock's Stacking mod and thousands of incomplete compatibility mods

Couple of questions/ideas though:
1. will there be a prototype property that we can control allowing/disallowing stacking of specific items or changing their maximum "stack" size, i.e. rockets don't stack?
2. how does it look for example with rockets? They're primarily vertical item, so they would probably look weird when stacked vertically, maybe we could get support for alternative graphics for stacks, e.g. a "box" with X rockets inside,
3. I've seen this mentioned already, but to +1 this: can we get similar thing for loaders (magical box that accepts unstacked items, and spit out the stacks)?

Semi-related questions/ideas:
4. could we get a toggle for normal stack inserters so they only move when their hand is full? Sometimes its faster to just wait for one more item than swing twice, it might also help UPS as there could be less interactions between entities and inserter itself won't activate so often,
5. can we get loaders to interact with trains? And can we get proper vanilla loaders?

Also, have a nice weekend