Friday Facts #200 - Plans for 0.16

[ske]

There could even be some worms so big and strong that you have to leave them alone till late in the game. These super strong worms would protect really big ore patches and you have to build your rail around that in order to get to smaller ore patches that are less protected.

Yes, please. (There are many good ideas on making terrain matter in this thread, though implementing them all would seem far too much for a game so late in development. But "super worms" is something which should be fairly easy to add - just a recoloring and some new stats and done. Maybe have them highly resistant to all damage types except nukes!)

In case these super worms get in the game they really need to be correlated with the resources and be really rare in order to make sense. Maybe only like three to ten super worms to kill during "normal" game. Also, the player can work around those worms going just for smaller ore patches.

Currently there are so many small and big worms everywhere it all blends into a mash. Just lasering down everything takes the fun out of it after some time. I would go around the nests but they are everywhere and biters come attacking all the time when running around exploring and laying rail.

[NotABiter]

The way resource spawning works, the parameters Frequency and Size each influence both, the actual frequency and the actual size. So when you set the Frequency of an ore to very low but its size to very high the result is a somewhat high frequency, if you use low frequency and small size then the ore does not spawn at all.

Thanks for the info. (Now that you mention it, I seem to have some vague memories of some distant FFF or something where they talked about their resource distribution function.)

Unfortunately that means the map gen is basically broken. "Frequency" doesn't mean "frequency" (and I don't see how the average Factorio player is supposed to know that). And whereas I speculated earlier that the game doesn't compensate for large deposits by slightly increasing their average on-center spacing, it's far worse because what it's actually doing is the opposite - decreasing (apparently significantly) their average spacing. And perhaps worst of all, there's simply no way at present to get (vanilla) Factorio to actually do what I want - (true) low frequency big/rich deposits. (At least given this info I can try stepping the size down one notch and keeping the richness high and see how much space that gives me. Stepping the size down too much though really isn't an option when playing with expensive recipes and expensive tech -- playing the "try to set up new mining outposts as fast as the old ones run out" game isn't really very fun. Spending so many hours developing a game like Factorio and then not even bothering to have something so fundamental as resource generation working properly is really baffling to me - I hope they fix it.)

It seems like this frequency vs size issue is something that the game devs could compensate for (even if not 100% accurately). I.e. if they know their map generator has this (really undesirable) property where deposit size affects frequency, can't they just apply a "size compensation factor" to the requested frequency to make the resulting/generated frequency actually be (more or less) what the player requested? (I mean, there's only a very limited number of frequency and size combinations, so it would seem at worst they would only need a small table of compensation factors to cover every single combination.) Or if that can't be made to work, how about just making the game (after preliminary resource generation) just filter out the smallest deposits (in a given area) until the desired low frequency is obtained? (I've been meaning to try RSO - maybe I'll have to do so to get what I want. But if RSO has solved the problem, then couldn't Factorio just use that same solution?)

Out of curiosity... does what you say also mean that when you explore outward to find progressively bigger patches, they'll also get progressively closer together (i.e. progressively more frequent)?

EDIT: The wiki page for the generator has lots of good/bad info. (Good in that it's informative. Bad in that it brings more bad news.) To answer my own last question, only richness increases as you go further out, so that shouldn't affect deposit size, frequency or distribution. Unfortunately the resources story appears to be even worse than Loewchen's comment let on, because decreasing size (to get a lower effective deposit frequency) not only decreases frequency of deposits and (of course) deposit size, but also (significantly) decreases effective richness. So dropping the size setting down even one notch is going to have a major impact on how many mining outposts need to be set up over time to support a given base. I'm now trying to find if there's a work-around. (What i have in mind is using console commands to set the map frequency/size/richness settings to nonstandard values as needed to get the desired result, and then any new area I explore would be "fixed", but I don't know yet if this is even possible.)

[Engimage]

First of all I would encourage devs to continue FFs.
I am not currently playing Factorio due to time limitations but I do surf Factorio forums daily and try to help people and discuss ideas. And one thing I do wait every week is FF. Every week it is like a celebration of the end of the work and a fresh wind to chill my mind. Every week I am waiting to get a nice chunk of positive and interesting stuff.
So please do continue.

As for the topic.
I do find noise an acceptable source of map generation.
However there should be probably more layers of the noise.
First layer is height. Noise level low. Below zero (or certain level) is water, above is ground/hills/impassable mountains (would really like to see those) etc.
Then you can go several routes. You can either go all noisy there regarding biomes or optionally:
- Add a layer of sunlight/temperature
- Add a layer of wind power
- Make a humidity map which can be calculated based of water adjacency / temperature / wind power
- Select biome based of all parameters above.

One benefit for this might be being able to use those parameters (like sunlight, wind) to mess up with power generation

The natural generation (the way I call this algorithm) is a cool thing that can look and feel really beautiful making real explanations of how and why the tile has this particular look.

Another most cool feature I would like to see in the game is animated tiles. Water and wind can have cool animations and can make the world much more alive. Maybe tree animation as well.

And yes. For resource generation RSO algorithms seam to be much more convenient than those of vanilla game.

Anyways keep up the good work guys! You are the most cool team I've ever met. Your work inspires so many people! And as an active part of the game community I can promise to do all I can to make your game better!

[IronCartographer]

So dropping the size setting down even one notch is going to have a major impact on how many mining outposts need to be set up over time to support a given base. I'm now trying to find if there's a work-around. (What i have in mind is using console commands to set the map frequency/size/richness settings to nonstandard values as needed to get the desired result, and then any new area I explore would be "fixed", but I don't know yet if this is even possible.)

Unless/until vanilla implements scaling for the cutoff size threshold that increases as the wavelength (or Size perhaps?) is increased (filtering the unwanted scattered small patches created by increasing the size), the solution is to use RSO.

The vanilla mapgen version would probably have to use non-linear Size scaling along with the cutoff, in order to maintain the desired increase in resources (lose the small ones + grow the large ones somewhat = net neutral).

The building-on-ore pain is real.

[dinodod]

Please please Please!!! Look into the UDP issues when downloading a map. People are still having issues where the map downloads kills all the bandwidth and the map download fails.

You may not notice it on your gigbabit connections but some of us live in places where 5 MB is all we have.

Something has to be done to stop UDP floods (I presume that's what is happening as the game is soley UDP based) when on slow networks. Please include some sort of smart downloader / bandwidth control feature, something, anything to allow maps to download without issues. Delta map downloads?? I believe this would help a lot even for the desync issues when you have 20+ players reconnecting at once

Also, what news is there to fix lag issues with biters when in late games? FPS tanks to 4 FPS for me and others when people attack the biters. I am guessing this is due to the total amount of entities that are getting updated but surely there must be a way to optimize it.

As for the issue with large explored maps and tons of biters, can you make it so that people can unload chunks of the map unless they use personal radar stations??? Similar to how speakers have a global playback option. This way people can go explore and I wont see anything unless I want to. Or something similar. I am thinking this might help with the lag issues some people have since there are SO many updates that it lags the game for slow connections and for those of you who explore, it wouldn't interfere with my gameplay as I don't render any of that info.

Please, find some low bandwidth connections and play on them with large maps and lots of biters. It's extremely frustrating not being able to play in a mega base in MP since there are so many changes happening at once the bandwidth cant handle it

I'm very tired so I may have rambled. I hope to hear back from the devs directly on these matters. Thank you

[bobingabout]

Also, it will be much better if there are no trees surrounding the spawn point.
Edit: I meant big forest.

Although I can understand the annoyance of starting in a dense forest, I have to voice my disagreement with no trees.
While in vanilla you can get by with using very little wood (small electric poles being pretty much the only requirement for having wood, and only because metal poles require research), having no wood would completely break my mods.

I remember doing a map generation run trying to find a good map to play my mods in back in 0.12, and rejected quite a few maps because of the lack of trees in the starting area.

Edit: and about Artillery train.... do we really need a new system? How about just reuse the equipment grids?

Am i the only one that miss the point of having an Artillery Train ?

Is an artillery train really needed? Why not unlock the vehicles equipment grids as part of vanilla and add some more goodies for the grids. It seems way easier than making a new train...

I have to agree. I fail to see why an artillery train is even a good idea.
Maybe add an artillery weapon for use on train vehicle equipment grids, but do we really need a whole new train?
I added vehicle equipment grids to my mod (It is its own mod), one of the grid weapons that can be used on the Armored train (Added in my logistics mod, which means you can't use this item on a train with only my equipment mod) is a plasma cannon. This is an artillery weapon.

IT SUCKS!!!

There's 2 complaints I See quite often with my vehicle equipment mod.
1. How come I can't put vehicle equipment in my train grid? (Mod incompatibility with another mod adding grids)
2. Why is the plasma cannon crap?

It blows up your own base.
it blows up the railway lines
Even with a minimum range set, it blows itself up! (I'm 99% sure I did everything right to set the weapon to target position, yet the projectile still tracks an enemy, an enemy that is running towards the train, causing the projectile to turn around, come back, and blow the train up)

I mean, it could be my implementation of the artillery weapon that people dislike(make the projectile faster, it doesn't have chance to come back and blow up the train), but it does put the idea of an artillery train in a very bad light.

[Hellatze]

well. i hope dev include big biome and another biome.

see desert and forest all the time, bores me. (and please dont talk about mod in this section)

[Mooncat]

Although I can understand the annoyance of starting in a dense forest, I have to voice my disagreement with no trees.
While in vanilla you can get by with using very little wood (small electric poles being pretty much the only requirement for having wood, and only because metal poles require research), having no wood would completely break my mods.

I remember doing a map generation run trying to find a good map to play my mods in back in 0.12, and rejected quite a few maps because of the lack of trees in the starting area.

You are talking about having a forest next to your spawn point. But I meant the situations where you start in the middle of a dense forest, such that you have to escape from it before you can actually start building things.

It blows up your own base.
it blows up the railway lines

How about setting force = "enemy" for the aoe of the plasma cannon? Though it won't damage trees.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I mean, it could be my implementation of the artillery weapon that people dislike(make the projectile faster, it doesn't have chance to come back and blow up the train), but it does put the idea of an artillery train in a very bad light.

I've been saying for a while that I don't really get what the point of artillery train would be.

• You can't use it for expansion since you have to have expanded there to lay the rails in the first place
• You can't use it for perimeter defence since there's every chance biters will wander through gaps in the train schedules
• You can't use it to defend ore trains because it'd need to kill biters very quickly at long range to get them off the tracks before the train gets there, a short-range high-power weapon or battering ram would be better

Probably the biggest use it would see is a return to turret creeping, except now it will be rail creeping. Lay a segment of rail, plant an artillery train and maybe some turrets, slowly advance the rail. This is of course totally counterproductive, one of the bigger projects of 0.15 was making turret creeping obsolete.

I do think we need a long range weapon, ideally that prioritises spawners or is targeted, and there are many possible implementations from the artillery cannon to AI tanks to the orbital laser. We have nukes, we have rockets, why can't we combine the two? As I see it there are two niches to fill, in the mid game a long-range weapon to stave off expansion from getting too close to your factory, and late game to make expansion easier. Artillery train does neither of these things.

[Saiph]

I think adding elevation effects to the map terrain would be a terrific idea, and would give players some interesting tactical and strategic problems to solve. For example, if there were ranges of high hills or mountains on the map, with the peak areas being closed off as impassable, and with only narrow mountain passes connecting areas on either side of the range, it would force both the player and the biters into narrow bottlenecks. This could concentrate the biter attacks into cutting off the passes, but the player could build walls and turrets to turn areas like that into fortified "killing zones".

Another idea I've had is to increase the variety of rail operations. I realise that Factorio isn't primarily supposed to be a railway simulator, and this idea depends on how far you want to push the balance of the game towards rail logistics. But I think it would be interesting to give players a choice of several rail locomotives to build, depending on the job they're supposed to be doing. You could have an "express" loco (much like the current one), with medium power and good top speed, designed for hauling 4+ wagons over long distances between mining outposts and your main base. You could also have a more powerful but slower loco for hauling wagons over mountain passes, or other places where the railway has steep gradients. You could also have a smaller "shunter" loco (I think this might be called a "yard" loco in the US) which is fairly cheap and available quite early, which is suitable for moving up to 3-wagon trains around the local area of your base. This could lead to procedures where an "express" loco delivers a long train to your base, then uncouples and heads off to pick up another long train elsewhere. Then smaller "shunter" locos could break up the delivered train according to the cargo in each wagon, and take wagons off to different areas of your base to be processed (iron smelting, copper smelting, stone brick manufacturing etc).

Whatever you guys decide to do in future, I wish you luck. I'm really enjoying playing the Steam 14.nn version of Factorio as it is now, and I'm following the "Factorio Beginners Guide" on YouTube, by Aavak and Shen. I'm also just beginning to explore the new features in the 15.nn beta. Factorio is rapidly making its way to the very top of my Steam games list in terms of total time played. It's already beating Skyrim, which I thought I was addicted to. Now I know what addiction really is!

[dinodod]

Wow, are you guys crazy? What's not to love about artillery trains?



Why should a new train be an issue? equipment grids in vehicles? really? Then mod your game as I'm sure the mod is still available

[dinodod]

We have nukes, we have rockets, why can't we combine the two? As I see it there are two niches to fill, in the mid game a long-range weapon to stave off expansion from getting too close to your factory, and late game to make expansion easier.

Nukes require you to get close to the nests and use a rocket launcher, yes? not ideal for long range. That may be what the artillery train would be able to do, launch cluster bombs on nests and wipe them out. Nothing more fun to watch then carpet bombing. Also Nukes are very end game stuff and by then, you just turret crept the map with lazers. I think the artillery cannon might be more mid game to help speed up the process perhaps. IMO I feel that the flame turrets are not used by anyone. Yet to see them in use in the few MP servers I been on.

Honestly, people still turret creep with lasers until they discover the joy of personal lazer defenses. Now that's OPed as heck. No more laser turrets needed and I can run circles around the biggest bases with no fear

[mrvn]

bin/x64/factorio --generate-map-preview=output-name.png --map-gen-seed=1230 --map-preview-scale=4

I assume this uses all the default settings. Could you add another parameter to give a map string that would be used as base for the settings and then --map-gen-seed, if given, would override the seed but keep all the other settings. --map-gen-kind=Railword could also be benefitial.

Another thing I would ask for is a preview with ores added. And maybe something that lists the minimum distance from the spawn point to each resource and their size at that location. Like "Coal: 500m, 400k".

[bobingabout]

We have nukes, we have rockets, why can't we combine the two? As I see it there are two niches to fill, in the mid game a long-range weapon to stave off expansion from getting too close to your factory, and late game to make expansion easier.

I don't recall ever saying that. You might have got your quote headders mixed up there.

[burner]

Why turrent train? Why not just modular wagon what allows install same mobile modules what modular power armor use? Then users can install modular turret or roboport or what they want to it.

[mrvn]

Why turrent train? Why not just modular wagon what allows install same mobile modules what modular power armor use? Then users can install modular turret or roboport or what they want to it.

And one could add other modules. Like an anti-inertia module so the train can accelerate faster.

[KingMetal]

Just a little piece of opensource-stuff i want to share for your world generation:

Website with dokumentation (althrough it seems the dokumentation seems to be written for an older version) accidentalnoise.sourceforge.net
Download -> sourceforge.net/projects/accidentalnoise/?source=navbar

Thats a nice little noise library that just happens to do exactly what you want to do, using a lua script to arrange specific noise functions and all that kind of stuff in the order and with the values you want it to be! Its free to use and modify for everyone, everything is written in cpp (so you can just pick what you need when you're finished and optimize the hell out of it) and it gives you all degrees of freedom you want. I really advise you guys to check this out.

Greetings from Germany and keep on developing this gem of a game!

[POPISowyNumer]

I'd say we really, REALLY need some more transportation methods, and upgrades to ones we have, ESPECIALLY since devs want huge-ass seas and landforms.

We need ships. Barges, ferries, motorboats and warships, with ports and shipyards to dock them, launch them and maintain them.

Trains need electric upgrade, with electrified tracks or some other power delivery. We've cut fuels from electricity generation, why can't we cut them from transportations.

Together with that could come modular carriages, kinda like fluid tankers already are. Each carriage could have three slots 2x2 big, with place for:
Fluid container with size of 1/4th or 1/5th of normal tank, since current size is ridiculous.
Resource container that holds 1/3th of steel chest worth
Ore container that holds twice the ore that container up above could carry, at expense of being only loadable and unloadable by special machine.
And finally weapon emplacements in four varieties. Flamethrower with 3k tank, expandable with positioning tanker beside it. MG turret with 5 stacks of ammo.
Laser turret with 750 shots worth of energy stored in batteries, or whatever it can pull from traction if train runs on electrified tracks. And the our beloved up-and-coming Artillery turret with tremendous range and Vo carrying 3 stacks of ammo.


Also redoing schedules to let them work like graphs instead of simple looooooooooooooooop would be great.

[LuckyBadger]

Slightly off topic, and someone might already have mentioned this in an earlier post; if so I apologise

It would be really helpful if forest and trees could be given a more obvious coloration in the minimap. When I am exploring, being chased by a horde of biters and low on life, I am not too concerned about whether I have desert or savannah in front of me, but I really, really don't want to run into a dense forest by accident!

As others have said, I look forward to the FFFs as marking the start of the weekend, so I hope that you will continue them. And thanks for a wonderful game - the one I have played most since first trying a dungeon game on a mainframe using a teletext machine (*such* a waste of paper) in about 1976.

[NotABiter]

2. Why is the plasma cannon crap?
It blows up your own base.
it blows up the railway lines
Even with a minimum range set, it blows itself up! (I'm 99% sure I did everything right to set the weapon to target position, yet the projectile still tracks an enemy, an enemy that is running towards the train, causing the projectile to turn around, come back, and blow the train up)

These are good things for the devs to consider when creating the artillery train. For both your mod and the upcoming artillery train I think an acceptable solution is to make them only target spawners and worms - those don't move and they don't exist close to your stuff (unless you actually build your stuff close to them).
The devs may have more solutions at their disposal than a mod though - for example another solution they could do (and I don't know if a mod could do this) would be to have "attack ground" targeting (basically what you tried to do) - let them target anything a safe distance from your own force's stuff, but the shots don't follow the target like some kind of guided missile (so they'd be good against spawners, worms, and large groups of biters sort of like "burning ground" from a flame turret is, but not so good against individual enemies on the move). An even better version of that would be to have the turrets try to lead targets - that would be pretty cool (far more like real artillery), and that would still allow for excluding shooting at positions too close to your own stuff.
I think it might be best, though, if artillery trains don't target biters/spitters, or can at least be set to not do so (or do so only when they are attacking). That's because if a spawner is just out-of-range of the train, I don't want the train shooting at (previously non-agro'd) enemies and thereby pulling enemies towards the base (with the subsequent expenditure of resources to kill them). For "defense duty", I'd prefer the train just leave such enemies alone and only fire at spawners (and maybe at enemies that are already agro'd anyways and on their way to attack).

You can't use it for expansion since you have to have expanded there to lay the rails in the first place

Probably the biggest use it would see is a return to turret creeping, except now it will be rail creeping. Lay a segment of rail, plant an artillery train and maybe some turrets, slowly advance the rail.

1. You clearly contradict yourself here (saying it can't be used for expansion, and then explaining how it could be used for expansion).
2. You need to think bigger. "Bad old turret creeping" is a highly tedious process involving chewing little bites out of a vast biter expanse. Yes, you could use artillery trains like that, but artillery trains will offer a better way of "creeping" - expand your whole base at once. I.e. unlike "traditional" turret creep, it would be feasible to do this around your whole base (or at least *much* easier - rails are cheaper than turrets, don't have idle power, don't need bullet belts or fuel pipes), expanding outward in all directions at once. And it would make use of artillery train(s) you already have going around your base anyways (for defense). Since artillery should be longer range, it will probably be possible to expand out many rail-widths each time (so you're expanding out not only along a massively wider surface area than "traditionaly creeping", but also in bigger steps forward). Have construction bots and materials available all around your perimeter and you can do the whole operation from map view... and then go off and do other stuff while while your trains and robots make it all happen. (That said, this expanding force would need some lasers or other turret as well - killing spawners will agro biters which will then attack the train and tracks, so lasers would be needed to deal with them. But it would not need nearly as much as traditional creeping because you would be taking spawners out at a greater range and therefore agro'ing far less enemies.)
3. An artillery train could also be used to more easily lay track through enemy territory as the artillery train can travel on the very track that you are in the process of laying. You can then either use militarized rail or combat robots to take out any biters that the train's spawner killing agros. This process involves really no creeping (temporary placement of "defenses") - the track is permanent (to the extent that any track is), as are any rail defenses.

You can't use it for perimeter defence since there's every chance biters will wander through gaps in the train schedules

You just need MOAR TRAIN.

Seriously though, you should be able to use it (quite effectively) for perimeter defense - it's just not a total (or even primary) defense solution by itself. But it should be able to do what *NO* current (vanilla) defenses can do, which is keep spawners out of agro range from your base. Right now if a spawner pops up too close and starts spewing a constant stream of enemies it requires manual intervention to go take care of it (to stop bleeding resources from constant attacks) -- artillery trains should automate getting rid of such spawners (and automation is a pretty core Factorio feature that players like). I know I've certainly been annoyed on more than one occasion at having to stop whatever I'm doing to deal with a too-close spawner and would like to have some way to automate that. Unless the devs screw it up horribly (e.g. prioritize biters over spawners so it never even kills the spawners, or give it "range 15" ), the artillery train should do the job nicely.

I do think we need a long range weapon, ideally that prioritises spawners

Who says artillery trains won't prioritize spawners? (I would hope the devs get that right.)

We have nukes, we have rockets, why can't we combine the two?

So, automated artillery is dangerous (according to bobingabout), but automated nukes are perfectly OK (according to you)? I am NOT looking forward to the first time a nuke goes off in my base!
And if you're not talking about something that can be automated, then you're missing the point of artillery trains (and not offering a viable alternate solution).

in the mid game a long-range weapon to stave off expansion from getting too close to your factory

Artillery train does neither of these things.

If you place them (and your other defenses) correctly, then how exactly will artillery trains fail in the "stave off expansion from getting too close" task? Keep in mind that the artillery train should generally be used in concert with other defenses, not by itself. E.g., a defensive wall might have some lasers behind it and track for an artillery train in front of it. The wall and lasers take care of the biters, and the artillery train takes care of (migration created) spawners.

Why turrent train? Why not just modular wagon what allows install same mobile modules what modular power armor use? Then users can install modular turret or roboport or what they want to it.

I believe the reason is that they want to give the player a long-range spawner-killer to keep spawners (new ones created by migration) at bay in an automated fashion, but they don't want to give this same range and killing power to the player character because that would be overpowered. If you just use the same "artillery module" (or whatever it is called) for both train and player character, then the player character becomes overpowered.
(That said, I would like to see modular wagons in vanilla that can have shields and short-range weapons along with "hardened"/indestructible rails/signals so I don't have to place defenses along my rails and can have proper individually-defended outposts and get away from "one big wall around everything" being optimal play.)