Friday Facts #258 - New autoplace

[MeduSalem]

With Oil patches being excluded from the Starting Area you guys should think about making Coal Liquefication accessible earlier, even before regular Oil industry and without the need of back-feeding heavy oil.

Simply because of how oil patches will become a gamble.

[Aeternus]

It is good to see the map generator worked on. However, I'm not convinced that having absolutely no oil in the starting area is going to be a good idea, given how early in your research chain oil will be needed (basically, as soon as blue research becomes a must). Players unhappy with this will gravitate towards small starting areas and just clicking the "regenerate" button until there's an oil patch close to the starting area.

Simple solution: Maybe provide an option for oil in the starting area with a default set to "none" instead? Even one or two oilwells can provide that first bit of oil to get things going.

[T-A-R]

Is there any reason you guys don't mention any fixes for the mess that lakes become as you move further from spawn? The swamp it becomes out there is really crap and the only way to not get a swamp is to disable water outside starting area.

Yes please keep in mind the test results further out, possibility for nice continental/ island maps, that could be a game changer for the map generator. Maybe even more than the starting area. I sort of liked the randomness of generating which led to speciallized exraordinary bootstrap bases. You'll have to leave your starting area anyhow. But improvement is a plus so thanks for the effort

Please don' t forget to consider if cliffs work as espected. Imho they feel pretty random now. And why can't my construction bots blow them up if explosives are provided?

[WeirdConstructor]

With Oil patches being excluded from the Starting Area you guys should think about making Coal Liquefication accessible earlier, even before regular Oil industry and without the need of back-feeding heavy oil.

Simply because of how oil patches will become a gamble.

As I understood it, Oil patches should be a resource you don't have readily and early available.
It's the first resource you need to reach out for, to invest some risks, build a car, get some ammo and clear some Biter bases.
To earn that resource is a challenge and probably the only reason to actually explore the map a bit.

Thats at least the reasoning I am following when I read the FFFs and other feedback from the devs on the forums.

However, I would agree on making Coal Liquefication possible to research without having Oil available.
Maybe very expensive, so that the player has to think hard about whether to research that or explore
the world more.
Having coal liquefication only available so late seems to be a bit useless, since you get it somewhere at the end
of mid game, when you usually already got a solid Oil flow/production for your rocket.

The reasoning I could imagine behind the lateness of the Oil liquefication is maybe, that once you have solar panels
and nuclear reactors and electric smelters, you have no real use for coal anymore, except as ingredient for grenades and explosives.
So being able to use it as oil at that point can be helpful.

[SHiRKiT]

I really think you are great developers by thinking about the NPE so much, and I think you guys are right about it. A lot of the players that are more "hardcore" are already playing the game, and you've already got a lot of more "casual" players, and this all aims on making a better experience for them. This is really great! Maturity of the project!

[db48x]

I'm going to have to update and improve my tutorial on the map generator settings: http://db48x.net/factorio-terrain/

Thanks, great tutorial !

Thank you!

In the mean time, does anyone want to take bets on whether the elevation shading in those screenshots is going to remain in the game?

Why would it disappear ?
What's weird is that I don't have it in my map preview ??
My hope is that they'll eventually manage to make cliffs follow elevation...

Version 0.16 makes an elevation map that determines where the water ends up, but it never shows you anything about that elevation. It doesn't show you running up and down the hills, and the slopes don't make items slide off the belts. The shading in these new screenshots is very nice, but since the elevation doesn't have any gameplay effect, I'm wondering if it's intended to stay or if it's just an aid to developing the new terrain generation.

[Ghoulish]

MY biggest complaint about the current map generator and why it sucks, is the Mess high water settings does to a map. What I want to see is Huge bodys of water around large land masses like you see in the older map generator, not this unusable swamp we get now.

The biggest issue I find with the terrain generator is the water settings. It seems you are either going "only water in starting area" or having lots of lakes/ponds with tiny land choke points. If I were to set the water to very high in size, I would hope to see large "oceans" hundreds of tiles wide. Similarly, the frequency of water is either MILLIONS of lakes or three. There seems to be no progression for either for water generation.

Also please look into water generation resulting in a swamp-like map with high water settings. Can this be more like sea-ocean like? Like decreasing the base frequency so that overall scale is larger.

Is there any reason you guys don't mention any fixes for the mess that lakes become as you move further from spawn? The swamp it becomes out there is really crap and the only way to not get a swamp is to disable water outside starting area. Do you guys consider this not to be an issue?

I'd like to add my voice to the above, with the old map generator you could have huge bodies of land and ocean. Since the update it's impossible to have this style of map. You always end up with something like this:

g3f443gt4f3gh.png (34.21 KiB) Viewed 7298 times

Some sort of pokey-wirey land mass situation which I (and a fair few others it would seem) Do not like or want for their games. Thank you for the world generator update in today's FFF interesting read as always! I really hope that you are willing to give us a setting which would allow for the old style pre 0.16 generation, where we could have huge continents with massive oceans if we wished..

[voddan]

Nicely done!
Please also make sure that there are some tree and rocks in the starting area. They are very nice to have in early game.

[ledow]

Maybe it's time for the scenario settings to let you choose the map generator you want.

I.e. set all the resources and use the "Geographically accurate" generator. Or the "0.16" generator for compatibility. Or the "evil god" generator that technically complies with your wishes but makes your life as hard as possible to GET to that huge, large resource that's right near your base.

[Atraps003]

This might seem a bit controversial so we can add an option that disables this whole starting area logic, for purists.

So if I have my way there will be a "no special starting area resource placement" option.

Yes please.

[meganothing]

This might seem a bit controversial so we can add an option that disables this whole starting area logic, for purists.

Absolutely, yes, thank you. Excited I'm a purist now

Obvioulsy being a purist, I don't see the problem with oil. If you fear for your oil, simply increase oil frequency to a higher level (and decrease richness if you want it balanced out).

[RoadRunner71]

This is my first post here. I've played Factorio since version 0.8 (I think) and I LOVE this game. You guys rock! I can't wait for 0.17!

One thing that I found rather bizarre in the past is when the map generator would place you on an island only one or a few tiles in size which is, of course, unplayable. This really should be filtered out. Of course, this isn't as big a problem with the regenerate button, now. But it would be nice to be able to zoom in on the starting area when looking at a map before committing to it. I'd really like to see what the starting area looks like in detail (since trees don't show up in the map preview).

Once I get steel, trees are just a nuisance. But I've had maps generated with NO trees in the starting area. And if you turn trees off there should be something in your starting gear to let you at least start doing science. (maybe a pair of power poles?)

I would also love to see a way to navigate the water tiles so that perhaps we could place oil derricks over submerged oil fields and perhaps even special miners that can mine ore under water that must have its ore collected by a ship (no belts in the water). Also the ability to lay special (high tech science required, at least) pipeline for oil under water. Not to allow pipelines to snake under water to avoid biters but only to allow oil to be pumped to shore.

I've always felt that water should be less of a barrier late game since we have the technology, now, to exploit certain resources covered by water. You'd think a star-faring civilization would have better tech for doing that than we do, now. And no boats? Seriously? Were you considering adding that at some point? Water navigation has been around for thousands of years. But you can't do it in the game? That's always been a glaring omission IMHO. And people I've showed the game to ALWAYS ask about how to deal with water (other than just skirting it).

To offset the advantages of making water less of a barrier for players, perhaps there should be an evolution of biters that can traverse water, too? That would open a whole new dynamic for players who like to play with biters on (I don't care for biters at all and am glad we no longer need science based on destroying their spawners).

[Rinin]

What about starting areas for multiplayer? It seems it'll be even harder to generate balanced start for 2 players.

[Ecen]

I agree with several other posters about water. I usually want to play with and around oceans or large lakes, not swamps. Better support for that in the map generator would be great!

Another thing that I would like is support for multiple spawns. Me and a friend usually start a new world by building a small base together until we have enough turrets and ammo to fight ourselves out from the center and build our own bases. Unfortunately this is very difficult since biters camps become very large far out, even early game. (Haven't used it, but something like what this mod does might be ideal. Another solution might be to allow for starting a world without biters, and spawn them in later on command or on a timer.)

[TOGoS]

Nice! Seems like a lot of effort just so players don't need to spam "regenerate", but awesome work nonetheless

That's one benefit, but the other one is that having starting area ores 'take care of themselves' means that we don't have to worry about them while fixing the elevation function. I.e. the ore placement thing was a prerequisite to fixing anything related to cliffs and water.

Is there any reason you guys don't mention any fixes for the mess that lakes become as you move further from spawn? The swamp it becomes out there is really crap and the only way to not get a swamp is to disable water outside starting area.

Elevation is actually relatively easy to mess with. I agree with a lot of folks here that it was good in 0.12 and that something between 0.13 and 0.15 made the lakes too small and uninteresting. 0.16 was kind of an experiment (I wanted a map generator that made lots of different kinds of places at different points on the map, so that everyone's favorite sized cluster of lakes would appear somewhere if you explored far enough, but I think I did not 100% succeed).

Edit: Just noticed the one line about small tweaks to some other features coming. Still, any news on the water generation?

Given that it appears to be a sore spot for the majority of commenters on here, it probably will be included in said "tweaks". Ideally there will be options for the elevation function. This is already possible by creating a map from the command-line with

Code: Select all

--create saves/mynewgame.zip --map-gen-settings my-awesome-settings.json

, just not through the GUI.

In the base game we're planning to do this for starting area resources, but not for resources outside of the starting area.

Why not for other areas?

The idea is that changing one setting in the map generation GUI should affect other things as little as possible so that the function of each slider becomes obvious. So if you're changing water level, we don't want resource patches jumping around. Imagine if the map responded in real-time while you move the sliders. Preview generation isn't fast enough in its present state to make that work super well, but that's the star we're aiming for.

I love this game but I have honestly not played at all this patch because of the garbage map generator right now.

I even made a mod for this. This really should be fixed.

Relating to your mod, one thing that is already fixed for 0.17 is that there is no longer a magical starting area. Mods will be fully in control of all noise variables.

[BlueTemplar]

What about starting areas for multiplayer? It seems it'll be even harder to generate balanced start for 2 players.

Why wouldn't it scale to N starting areas for N players ?? (If those are not teamed up of course...)

[BlueTemplar]

It is good to see the map generator worked on. However, I'm not convinced that having absolutely no oil in the starting area is going to be a good idea, given how early in your research chain oil will be needed (basically, as soon as blue research becomes a must). Players unhappy with this will gravitate towards small starting areas and just clicking the "regenerate" button until there's an oil patch close to the starting area.

Simple solution: Maybe provide an option for oil in the starting area with a default set to "none" instead? Even one or two oilwells can provide that first bit of oil to get things going.

Oil is needed even "before" Blue Science :
you need it for Green Science stuff like :
FlameThrowers/Turrets, Landmines, Rockets, Laser Turrets;
Construction and Logistic Robots, Tier 1 Modules, Accumulators, Cliff Explosives;
Modular Armor, Portable Solar Panels, Personal Batteries, Nightvision and Energy Shields !

One thing that I found rather bizarre in the past is when the map generator would place you on an island only one or a few tiles in size which is, of course, unplayable. This really should be filtered out. Of course, this isn't as big a problem with the regenerate button, now. But it would be nice to be able to zoom in on the starting area when looking at a map before committing to it. I'd really like to see what the starting area looks like in detail (since trees don't show up in the map preview).

Once I get steel, trees are just a nuisance. But I've had maps generated with NO trees in the starting area. And if you turn trees off there should be something in your starting gear to let you at least start doing science. (maybe a pair of power poles?)

The in-game Restart (rather than out-of-game Regenerate) button has been fixed since 0.15.0 :
https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/0.15.0#0.15.0

[BlueTemplar]

MY biggest complaint about the current map generator and why it sucks, is the Mess high water settings does to a map. What I want to see is Huge bodys of water around large land masses like you see in the older map generator, not this unusable swamp we get now. After that is fixed I feel like the current problem of resources being eaten by water will be massively reduced. I love this game but I have honestly not played at all this patch because of the garbage map generator right now.

I even made a mod for this. This really should be fixed.

There's also this mod :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/NewIslands

[Mylon]

My stance on starting ore generation: The factorio engineer isn't making a completely uncontrolled descent and can pick a favorable site.

[TOGoS]

In the mean time, does anyone want to take bets on whether the elevation shading in those screenshots is going to remain in the game?

Why would it disappear ?
What's weird is that I don't have it in my map preview ??
My hope is that they'll eventually manage to make cliffs follow elevation...

Version 0.16 makes an elevation map that determines where the water ends up, but it never shows you anything about that elevation. It doesn't show you running up and down the hills, and the slopes don't make items slide off the belts. The shading in these new screenshots is very nice, but since the elevation doesn't have any gameplay effect, I'm wondering if it's intended to stay or if it's just an aid to developing the new terrain generation.

So the long answer is that the any-scale map preview generator that's available from the command line and that I used to generate those previews doesn't know where cliffs would be placed, since placing cliffs accurately can't be done without looking at every cell on the map, and in order to be able to generate really large, zoomed-out maps, it only samples the noise at every Nth cell. The elevation shading was added to help see where cliffs might be placed and to otherwise better understand what the elevation function was up to.

Even though elevation has no effect in the game, I leave slope shading turned on while generating previews because it makes the maps look prettier.