Factorio Forums

The robot effect is awesome.

I have a small complaint about the poison cloud. When the capsule is thrown and hits the center of the effect circle, the whole circle fills with the cloud at the same rate. I feel it looks a bit strange that cloud appears at the edge instantly after the capsule hits.

I think the effect would be much better it the center filled with cloud fast and spread out from the center with a bit of a wave effect.

vorax wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 15, 2020 3:11 pm

The robot effect is awesome.

I have a small complaint about the poison cloud. When the capsule is thrown and hits the center of the effect circle, the whole circle fills with the cloud at the same rate. I feel it looks a bit strange that cloud appears at the edge instantly after the capsule hits.

I think the effect would be much better it the center filled with cloud fast and spread out from the center with a bit of a wave effect.

Well … at least now the correlation between when the damage is applied and what the visuals say is obvious. When you have the visuals gradually increasing in radius, it would feel weird to have the damage reach the outer areas instantly, before even the cloud visuals reach them.

I think that Combat robots (destroyer robots for example) should do something a bit more aggressive than simply float around after the player.

The way they follow the player around means that the optimal way to fight is to run towards the nest, then reverse direction and run away from it at the last moment, causing the combat bots to "swing" into the middle of the nest and get a bunch of damage done. The mechanic of "drift after the player" means that this is currently the most optimal way to use them, but it's not that fun. It feels indirect, like the combat robots aren't really protecting, they have no awareness of the threats to the player.

There's an opportunity for something that makes the player feel really powerful, if they have the production to back it up. Drifting after the player is okay when there are no threats around. But when an enemy is close, it would be cool if they would act more like spitters - aggressively moving to engage. Could the same AI be used for that?

Great changes, love it.

Though now I kinda want the biters to run away from the poison cloud damage, but maybe this is just for demo purposes?

posila wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:21 am

When you run around fighting biters, you don't really focus your attention on...

...virtually anything at all except actual fighting itself, but you went ahead and made better graphics over the course of development despite that being "not a priority" by that logic. Because you can come up with a million excuses but the fact of the matter remains; bad janky graphics is bad janky graphics no matter how you rationalize it. And given it's something players will see a lot you gotta fix it sooner than later. Something as simple as a cloud of dust kicked up when it crashes will do the job, of course a bit of fire and smoke and robot bits flying in all directions would look better. Or if you think that's too much distraction, make a full transition animation where the robot actually gets destroyed, not just switches its sprite to that of a dead robot.

What I disliked about the old poison cloud animation was that it played backwards! It was like a vortex spiraling *into* the grenade. I couldn't unsee it.

I kept meaning to make a mod that reversed the animation, but this is good too

BattleFluffy wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 15, 2020 3:43 pm

There's an opportunity for something that makes the player feel really powerful, if they have the production to back it up. Drifting after the player is okay when there are no threats around. But when an enemy is close, it would be cool if they would act more like spitters - aggressively moving to engage. Could the same AI be used for that?

This would be cool. Make them approach the enemy nearest the player, and fire at the enemy nearest the player *and* within their range. (So they won't hold fire against valid targets just because they haven't reached the one they want yet.)

Possible downside is that in practice, they would tend to focus on biters over spitters, and spitters over worms. Could be a problem if you've got the exos to outrun biters and spitters/worms are the real threat.

Can we work on making the alien / survival dynamic a little more... deep?

Like, I'd like to see other forms of life on the planet. Birds? Mammals? What do the bugs eat? DO they eat? Maybe there's some kind of earthquake activity, or volcanos, or I don't know, acid storms.

I guess I'm just sad that there's just bugs that replicate themselves endlessly and get bigger and that's it. Like, why would you ever use a poison capsule when they're just going to spawn infinitely?

I've been playing the game for a couple years now, and the appeal is starting to wear off. Just seems 1 dimensional.

Both additions are great!

I recommend to add a small dust or smoke cloud when spinning robot hits earth because transition between falling and laying robot is… There’s no smooth transition. This moment can be hidden.

A dust cloud big enough to hide the appearance of the bot corpses would be at least as big as the bot corpse itself, so then that would be the thing that "pops in" instead, and then people would be giving their tuppence about that.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way it is.

posila wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:21 am

Deadlock989 wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 15, 2020 1:36 am

The abrupt transition might be partly to do with the very artificial test scene in the gif. Bots tend not to just drop out of the sky like that. I've been playing with the spinning-bot-particle method for my own modded bots and when there's projectiles and explosions and debris and biter spit flying around as well, you don't really notice it.

Pretty much this.
As every other FFF we show some effect which is meant to improve overall visual feel of the game, people start overanalyzing it, and start pointing out all the imperfections, because the effect is the only thing they can see. When you run around fighting biters, you don't really focus your attention on bots dropping out of sky. You can see it's happening, but don't focus on it long enough to "shortcuts" in the animation.

I don’t think it’s fine, just not bad; it could be fixed after 1.0 release. Or maybe devs won’t fix because "not bad" is "good enough" for this game?

coppercoil wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:09 pm

I don’t think it’s fine, just not bad; it could be fixed after 1.0 release. Or maybe devs won’t fix because "not bad" is "good enough" for this game?

Or maybe they won't "fix" it because there is literally no pleasing some people ...

Who knows... We have seen many improvements that weren’t asked at all

Locane wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:59 am

I've been playing the game for a couple years now, and the appeal is starting to wear off. Just seems 1 dimensional.

As opposed to the games you've played for a couple years where the appeal of the less important parts has not started to wear off?

Locane wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:59 am

Can we work on making the alien / survival dynamic a little more... deep?

Like, I'd like to see other forms of life on the planet. Birds? Mammals? What do the bugs eat? DO they eat? Maybe there's some kind of earthquake activity, or volcanos, or I don't know, acid storms.

I guess I'm just sad that there's just bugs that replicate themselves endlessly and get bigger and that's it. Like, why would you ever use a poison capsule when they're just going to spawn infinitely?

I've been playing the game for a couple years now, and the appeal is starting to wear off. Just seems 1 dimensional.

Interesting, could some of these be particles?

Jon8RFC wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:10 pm

The robot animations are awesome!

YES, IT IS!

I had just tried the poison capsule a couple days ago (a result of reading FFF334), and found it remarkably fun to drive around in a tank annihilating biters with death clouds. I'd saved my game just before another raid and when I loaded it up yesterday, to my surprise everything was new and fancy.

It became ridiculously fun to drive around in a tank annihilating biters with death clouds.

And I didn't remember the bit about the new combat robot animations, so halfway through a large base I noticed some robots falling out of the sky and I was absolutely delighted at that bit of polish! In fact, I was so distracted and cheery that I ran into a large rock in the enemy base and almost got killed for it.

I love this. So much. Factorio is already a fantastic game to look at and between this, the UI cleanup and the sound updates (they're oh so sexy now) I'm totally giddy about this pre-release period and all the gorgeous updates that are happening.

Outstanding work Wube! Keep showing the world why you are, in my opinion, the best game dev team on Earth!