Friday Facts #108 - Unexpected Features

[kovarex]

About being cold, unexpected features and other stuff: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-108

[_aD]

Tease!

[kinnom]

is it just me or are the Friday facts released later and later?

[MeinAccount]

The smoke looks interesting. Just hoping, I won't affect performance.
(There's an image up on the Google site for those with the highest tear )

[Theace98]

Blueprint Book? Interesting, even though I very rarely use more than 2/3 blueprints (solar array and a protected large electric pole). But I don't know, if it's easy to identify blueprints, I may have more reason to use them.

The new smoke looks good, however the thing about the old smoke is that it gave the idea of a dirty smog cloud, full of soot and other industrial grime, the new smoke looks clean, almost like steam, which is a good effect for steam engines, however for boilers and furnaces I feel the smoke should be darker. Still the new smoke does look good and I'll admit it's nice to see the factory underneath.

[Smarty]

In other words it has been a good week and development on 0.13 will start soon i hope

[Peter34]

The new smoke looks good, however the thing about the old smoke is that it gave the idea of a dirty smog cloud, full of soot and other industrial grime, the new smoke looks clean, almost like steam, which is a good effect for steam engines, however for boilers and furnaces I feel the smoke should be darker. Still the new smoke does look good and I'll admit it's nice to see the factory underneath.

I agree, darker smoke is required from Boilers/Furnaces.

Not only is that good education, reinforcing that pollution is bad, it's also fitting for Factorio's general dieselpunk visual style.

[DOSorDIE]

Smoke is good, but the visibility of the Buildings & Co should not be restricted.
Maybe make i with a bit less density ... and of course with a option to deactivate.

[mbritb]

BLUEPRINT BOOK!!!! Rseding you are AWESOME!!! Can NOT wait for this!! .13 is gonna be awesome with just that one feature alone! <3

[Jonathan88]

I have to say the snake looks epic! It really does suit the new Factorio style. However, will it work if Factorio gets a higher resolution later on?

P.S. It is very cold here in Britain too

[joon]

and of course with a option to deactivate.

You can deactivate by going into Menu -> Options -> Graphics and uncheck show smoke

[Zeblote]

The smoke/steam is fantastic for the engines, but I think it should be a bit darker for things that burn coal

I also like this answer on SO a lot:


Massive speedup for user scripts as a side effect It might even be fast enough for fully custom entities implemented in lua to be feasible.

[marsch]

I just use Visual Studio (2008). I think, it is the best for debugging. But I haven't use so many other tools for C,C++,C# .

[woytaz]

I agree with the point about darker smoke too. Idea: smoke's color could be affected by the amount of pollution created.

The blueprint book.. eh, I'm not so sure about it. It seems (admittedly, we only got a small sneak peak) that it's not as useful as mods like Blueprint String and Foreman. Sure, I can organize my blueprints, which somewhat encourages me to create more blueprints and more specialized ones but I still have to create them every single time I start a new game. That's insanely tedious.

Personally, I'd like the blueprint book be a better UI for Foreman or something of the sort. Give me a list of blueprints with their icons and names, perhaps show a large preview when I hover my mouse over one. Another good thing (I think) would be doing what Spore did for sharing stuff. Spore embedded the string describing the creature in an image file so you could just share the image and someone else could simply paste it into the appropriate folder to get it in their game.

[Buggi]

One thing that always bothered me is steam engines themselves do not give off smoke, they give off steam.

Boilers give off smoke.

Nice new graphics by the way.

[Drury]

Can't wait for the day that Factorio gets rewritten in assembly to eliminate determinism issues caused by third parties.

Then Intel comes up with a new architecture, breaking everything, and Wube gets into hardware development to ship their own Factorio-enabled CPUs.

[rkfg]

Oh, them nasty floats! I've read this and was quite impressed. Didn't know that crossplatform multiplayer could be that cumbersome. Looks like Feral encountered even more platform-specific issues with floating point calculations, and they're so severe that even Mac<=>Linux games aren't possible. I thought that all games with a dedicated server use snapshots to send the game state to all clients and hence there's no sync problems. I was terribly wrong. However, I can't think of single idea why they ditched game state broadcasting in favor of deterministic engine. Sounds like it brings heaps of issues and no real benefits...

[ratchetfreak]

Oh, them nasty floats! I've read this and was quite impressed. Didn't know that crossplatform multiplayer could be that cumbersome. Looks like Feral encountered even more platform-specific issues with floating point calculations, and they're so severe that even Mac<=>Linux games aren't possible. I thought that all games with a dedicated server use snapshots to send the game state to all clients and hence there's no sync problems. I was terribly wrong. However, I can't think of single idea why they ditched game state broadcasting in favor of deterministic engine. Sounds like it brings heaps of issues and no real benefits...

bandwidth savings and rubberbanding are the benefits

[Zeblote]

bandwidth savings and rubberbanding are the benefits

Shouldn't that be 'no rubberbanding'?

[Outsider]

The blueprints book looks awesome, good stuff!