Friday Facts #259 - Scan-codes, Prototype IDs, HR worm

[irbork]

Ho fast will worms dig tunnels and how long can they stay underground? Its important because if to fast and to long underground they may pop up in the middle of your base way past the defense line.

[theolderbeholder]

Ho fast will worms dig tunnels and how long can they stay underground? Its important because if to fast and to long underground they may pop up in the middle of your base way past the defense line.

You might want to hold this question until the feature goes from "intend to implement" to "tadaa!"

[Zavian]

Ho fast will worms dig tunnels and how long can they stay underground? Its important because if to fast and to long underground they may pop up in the middle of your base way past the defense line.

You might want to hold this question until the feature goes from "intend to implement" to "tadaa!"

Do you have a source for where the devs have said that they intend the worms to be capable of travelling? The dev diary talks about them planning to update the graphics and animations, but nothing that make me think that the worms will actually travel anywhere.

[BlueTemplar]

Forcing undo as Ctrl+key-right-to-left-shift works for the opposite, increasing the number of people who will rebind.

What makes you think that?

Because under the current proposition for Ctrl+Z, it's the AZERTY users that will be forced to rebind (away from it), due to the issue raised in the FFF !

Yeah, for AZERTY this is an unfortunate clash between the shortcuts and controls, not much can be done about it. Either change the controls or the shortcuts, the solution is up to the devs. However, the people in this thread mostly confirmed my statement: habits > effectiveness, because these habits ARE effective already. Playing the game you don't think "I should press W to move forward/up, let's do it". You want to go forward and your fingers do the required movements. For undo it's the same, you want to undo, your fingers go to Ctrl and Z positions automatically, relearning the new positions just for one game is totally not worth it no matter how short that new distance now is.

Yes, and movement controls obviously take priority on less used ones like undo.
It's not like I'm suggesting that movement should be moved to HJKL to make space for Ctrl+Z on AZERTY !

I still don't see how the habits of people that have been using keyboards for a while are more effective for the people that are just starting to learn to use a keyboard ?

[posila]

I still don't see how the habits of people that have been using keyboards for a while are more effective for the people that are just starting to learn to use a keyboard ?

Nobody here said anything about people that are starting to learn to use keyboard, I don't understand what does it have to do with this discussion.
EDIT: Ok, I can see you mentioned "new people" before, and at that time I interpreted as "people new to Factorio" not as "people that are just starting to learn to use a keyboard". Well, if undo should always be Ctrl+Z or always Ctrl+key-next-to-shift is irrelevant, because it pretty much generally is always Ctrl+Z (not counting terminal based programs and text editors like vim, etc.). Nobody will learn to use a keyboard by playing Factorio, so if we change it, everybody will be annoyed the shortcut is not what they are used to. To make matters worse, layouts that have Y and Z swapped, would have mapped undo to what normally is redo, which would really mess up with peoples heads and make them quite angry at the game.

Ho fast will worms dig tunnels and how long can they stay underground? Its important because if to fast and to long underground they may pop up in the middle of your base way past the defense line.

You might want to hold this question until the feature goes from "intend to implement" to "tadaa!"

Do you have a source for where the devs have said that they intend the worms to be capable of travelling? The dev diary talks about them planning to update the graphics and animations, but nothing that make me think that the worms will actually travel anywhere.

I also had to read the FFF again just to make sure I haven't missed anything

[Zok]

> replaced the keystroke handling from using key-codes to scan-codes

I'm worried that this might break my setup. I have escape rebinded to caplock and capslock to escape (vim user ). This means that I will probably have to press the actual escape button to enter the menu which will toggle caps lock every time and make browsing-while-factorio..ing annoying

[BlueTemplar]

To make matters worse, layouts that have Y and Z swapped, would have mapped undo to what normally is redo, which would really mess up with peoples heads and make them quite angry at the game.

Oh yeah, that's probably even worse than not being able to Ctrl-move-drag-to-north, not sure how we missed that?

[posila]

I'm worried that this might break my setup. I have escape rebinded to caplock and capslock to escape (vim user ). This means that I will probably have to press the actual escape button to enter the menu which will toggle caps lock every time and make browsing-while-factorio..ing annoying

You might need to rebind "Toggle menu" to CapsLock in the game options. So the option to reenable spacebar heating already exists

[BlueTemplar]

Nobody will learn to use a keyboard by playing Factorio

While Factorio is probably more "advanced" than other games, so might not be used as a first way to learn "Undo", don't you have something like a "Factorio education outreach" program, via Abregado ?
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241

Don't underestimate the learning opportunities that video games can provide !

[posila]

Well, then the game can teach them a shortcut they can use in almost any other application they will ever use, or it can teach them shortcut that works only in this game. Again, how is this even argument for your case?

I am sorry, it seems to me this is just your pet-peeve. I could argue that Ctrl+Z on QWERTZ keyboard is better, because it is far from more commonly used Ctrl+X/C/V so there is no risk of me doing Undo when I wanted to do Cut. Whole Ctrl+ZXCV seems arbitrary to me.

[Masterfloc]

As a French player I'm going to join what has already been said by several people: we do use Ctrl+Z for undo whatever the layout. Mapping the undo to Ctrl+whatever key is at the lower right does seem like a real bad idea for me.

But I'm not sure there's actually a reason to make such a fuss about it, doesn't the behavior described in the FFF actually look like a decent behavior in the event of a conflict ? Doesn't shock me at all to have my character stop if I press Ctrl while going north, and force the player to be stationary in order to perform an undo. I'd rather have that than having some random building I placed minutes ago ghosted...

Also, you guys can't imagine how those keyboard changes are going to save a headache for all new French players. Because while remapping the movements back to ZQSD was the first thing we would do, it also happened that we'd forget to remap the drop key, Z by default, which made all new players drop their stuff whenever going north XD

[Oktokolo]

Please tell me why worm spits follows a player and not travel in a straight line!?

It is to prevent player skill from having any impact in PvE combat. The combat is optimized to make the tactic of standing still while pressing the autoaim-and-fire-button and having some fish in the hand most efficient after turret creep.
If you want combat that is less optimized to be the most easy and boring experience possible, you have to use mods.
It is like this by design to not scare away the people having no RTS experience.

Ho fast will worms dig tunnels and how long can they stay underground? Its important because if to fast and to long underground they may pop up in the middle of your base way past the defense line.

It would be great if they would tunnel right into the middle of the base when not having good recon coverage. But don't worry: That will only happen in mods. The worms will probably not even move at all in vanilla. They will just lurk around and show their shiny claws to constantly remind us about what combat could have been...

[Tesse11ation]

Please tell me why worm spits follows a player and not travel in a straight line!?

It is to prevent player skill from having any impact in PvE combat. The combat is optimized to make the tactic of standing still while pressing the autoaim-and-fire-button and having some fish in the hand most efficient after turret creep.
If you want combat that is less optimized to be the most easy and boring experience possible, you have to use mods.
It is like this by design to not scare away the people having no RTS experience.

I don't think it's even that complicated, or planned as a "feature" to begin with. "Homing boulders" have been in video games long since the days of Age of Empires, and are especially prominent in the real-time strategy genre where consistency of attacks are key. In order for damage to be properly calculated with each hit to produce desired results, you often have to live with something that seems unrealistic for the sake of gameplay. If you could make entire attacks miss by out-microing your opponent in an RTS, it would break the game and be incredibly frustrating as you say, but often times this is simply how the game engine handles attacks.

There are ways to alleviate this effect, though: for instance, gun turrets. When you throw ammo into a gun turret and some biters approach, it mows them down, but you don't actually "see" the projectiles flying through the air. Therefore, you're left to assume that the gun turrets have pinpoint accuracy in "lore" terms (which they do), and your brain fills in the rest -- "the bullets fly so fast that they reach their target instantly and you don't even see them". Another place you can really see this is with laser turrets. The laser turrets had projectiles at first, so instead of firing a continuous beam, they went "Pew-pew!" However, because they HAVE to reach their target, you get that undesirable "homing boulder" effect. For a lot of people like me, this ruins your suspension of disbelief.

So, for something like this to work in an RTS (or a game like Factorio), you need one of two things to make you "believe" that the game is realistic: Either the "projectiles" in question reach their target instantly with 100% accuracy, or are fired in a beam (such as the gun turrets and new laser turrets respectively), OR they have "technology" in the projectile which actually makes it believable to home in on their target (such as with rocket launchers with "smart" rockets). "Dumb" projectiles such as with artillery wagons work well, because they have a splash range and typically just fire on static targets such as nests, or attempt to "lead" moving targets, much like the flamethrower turrets which actually spew out a constant number of small arcing projectiles.

A wonderful example of this is the classic RTS, StarCraft, its expansion Brood War, and the sequel StarCraft 2. In StarCraft/Brood War, infantry units such as Terran marines and Zerg hydralisks had projectile attacks, but they were only by description. Much like the gun turrets in Factorio, marines and hydralisks would "shoot" projectiles that hit their target instantly all the time. In the marine's case, you would only see the muzzle flash and the sparks of the bullets hitting the target at any given point. For the hydralisk, which resembles more of a spitter in Factorio, it would have the same concept as the marine: you would see its shoulder pads open up to fire the "needle spines" that actually looked and sounded more like an acid shot, and it would make a splash of acid instantly on the target they're firing at. On the other hand, many Terran and Protoss vehicles that use projectile weapons such as "pew-pew" lasers and missiles would actually either fly so fast that you barely notice any curve, or fly slow and have that homing effect, but actually be believable since they were rocket weapons. That is of course, with the exception of Protoss dragoons. Anyone who's played brood war remembers how derpy those guys were.

Fast forward to StarCraft 2: New engine, new units, new technology, yet projectiles are handled largely the same way. The Zerg roach, for instance, has an acid spray "projectile" as an attack, but it fires more like a beam where you see the acid fly through the air. However, even though the projectile itself lands on the target unit 100% of the time, the line of acid shot out appears so quickly and only ever goes in a straight line that there is no homing boulder effect to begin with. Factorio's Zerg-like enemies could have something like this in lieu of globs of spit that fly slow yet home in on the player. We know the engine is capable of producing trails such as with the new laser turrets, and the officially-sourced "bullet trails" mod.

Point in case: there are ways to rebuild a suspension of disbelief among Factorio players in combat without compromising the gameplay. I think it's important to bring this up, because for people like me who are veterans of the RTS genre, it just doesn't seem "right" to have such a fantastic game like Factorio that suffers from the same limitations on projectiles from games that released decades prior. There's a better solution, we've seen that the game engine supports it, and it would not be precedent-setting in any way. So, why not?

[Oktokolo]

If you could make entire attacks miss by out-microing your opponent in an RTS, it would break the game and be incredibly frustrating as you say, but often times this is simply how the game engine handles attacks.

I don't think, it would be game-breaking or frustrating. It would be great if we could outmicro worms and even the bigger biters (bigger ones should be slower). Would also make exploring more fun.
Also, microing is an important skill in the RTS genre since Starcraft. It is deciding battles quite often in higher tier games and commonly not considered game-breaking at all.

[BlueTemplar]

I don't think it's even that complicated, or planned as a "feature" to begin with. "Homing boulders" have been in video games long since the days of Age of Empires, and are especially prominent in the real-time strategy genre where consistency of attacks are key. In order for damage to be properly calculated with each hit to produce desired results, you often have to live with something that seems unrealistic for the sake of gameplay. If you could make entire attacks miss by out-microing your opponent in an RTS, it would break the game and be incredibly frustrating as you say, but often times this is simply how the game engine handles attacks.

Or you know, the game could just be designed with realistic physics in mind, and those be integrated into the gameplay?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qEGJlBLJSg&t=3m24s

or

Anyway, there are mods, like Rampant, that disable homing attacks.

[Tesse11ation]

If you could make entire attacks miss by out-microing your opponent in an RTS, it would break the game and be incredibly frustrating as you say, but often times this is simply how the game engine handles attacks.

I don't think, it would be game-breaking or frustrating. It would be great if we could outmicro worms and even the bigger biters (bigger ones should be slower). Would also make exploring more fun.
Also, microing is an important skill in the RTS genre since Starcraft. It is deciding battles quite often in higher tier games and commonly not considered game-breaking at all.

You're right, I misspoke. Poor word choice. What I really mean to say is that the only time micro should be considered is with "skill shot" target projectiles or AoE damage attacks being used by "spellcaster" units. Yes, you're right. It IS important to have micro. But, for such a macro-oriented game like Factorio, should micro be in just as huge of a focus as an actual RTS game where you control units with clicks instead of WASD, and -- more importantly -- should you really be able to out-micro your way out of basic enemy auto attacks?

That itself is a matter of opinion that I know not everyone will agree upon. As a bit of an RTS purist, my thought is no, and here's why: players are a lot more skilled at micro than biter AI -- especially if we're all using WASD to move. Auto attacks that always land by biter forces are simply a great way of biters compensating for this, and that means that as players are under attack from spitters, it will always produce predictable results, regardless of skill level.

Now, that being said, I'm also all for dodging AoE "skill shot" attacks from worms. That way, if you're surrounded by biters with no means of escape, it will always hit you. At that point, you could certainly argue that skill plays an important role in fighting them, and THAT I'm ok with since it doesn't feel like you're cheaply evading damage.

[Tesse11ation]

I don't think it's even that complicated, or planned as a "feature" to begin with. "Homing boulders" have been in video games long since the days of Age of Empires, and are especially prominent in the real-time strategy genre where consistency of attacks are key. In order for damage to be properly calculated with each hit to produce desired results, you often have to live with something that seems unrealistic for the sake of gameplay. If you could make entire attacks miss by out-microing your opponent in an RTS, it would break the game and be incredibly frustrating as you say, but often times this is simply how the game engine handles attacks.

Or you know, the game could just be designed with realistic physics in mind, and those be integrated into the gameplay?
[...]
Anyway, there are mods, like Rampant, that disable homing attacks.

Ok, but here's my only concern with that. If Factorio -- a game where UPS is vastly important due to sprawling mega-factories -- should the devs really spend time implementing a physics engine in a game that arguably doesn't need one, just for it to drag even more on older hardware?

I think not. Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation are entirely different games and therefore different beasts from Factorio, being physics-based RTS. I know this makes me sound like a hypocrite for saying that considering my wall of text earlier, but if you think about it, SupCom and TA don't have to worry about mega-factories and UPS as much. They're designed completely differently and are completely different games.

[BlueTemplar]

You haven't played TA/Spring/SupCom much then if you think that they don't have to worry about CPU performance, with their end-game of thousands of units!
Why do you think that SupCom1 was the first game boasting multi-threading support ?

And as you mentioned, the physics engine is already implemented in Factorio - flamers (and artillery?) use it.

[BlueTemplar]

But I'm not sure there's actually a reason to make such a fuss about it, doesn't the behavior described in the FFF actually look like a decent behavior in the event of a conflict ? Doesn't shock me at all to have my character stop if I press Ctrl while going north, and force the player to be stationary in order to perform an undo. I'd rather have that than having some random building I placed minutes ago ghosted...

No, it's not "decent behavior" !?
Don't you ever use Ctrl + right/left click drag to place modules in assemblers / ammo in turrets / etc. ?!?
(And dragging via moving your character often a more reliable way to do it.)

Ah, well, with a lot of mods (Picker Extended!) I have to rebind the Ctrl/Shift/Alt+Q/Z to A/W anyway,
and in the end I'll have to rebind less stuff since ZQSD for movement will work out of the box...

[Tesse11ation]

I'm a huge consistency freak, which is why evading basic attacks in physics-based RTS games feels cheap to me. I grew up playing StarCraft, so you will see some bias here. StarCraft and its successors didn't need a physics engine, because much like my opinion on Factorio, it doesn't add anything to the gameplay that would make the experience more fun. In turn, what you get is more predictability, which is super important especially in a competitive setting -- which is why you used to see pro circuit leagues for StarCraft all the time, but not any of the other RTS games that tried to match it. I still want to stress that this is all still a matter of opinion. But why not use the classic tried-and-true RTS formula for fixing homing boulders instead of implementing an entire physics engine around the concept?

You haven't played TA/Spring/SupCom much then if you think that they don't have to worry about CPU performance, with their end-game of thousands of units!
Why do you think that SupCom1 was the first game boasting multi-threading support ?
(AFAIK, SupCom is also less physics-based than TA?)

And as you mentioned, the physics engine is already implemented in Factorio - flamers (and artillery?) use it.

First of all, forgive me -- I've never played either SupCom or TA. I've only played Planetary Annihilation, which from what I've heard and seen, combines elements of the two as well as adding its own mix. That being said, PA has all sorts of issues of its own that physics-based gameplay brings with it. StarCraft: Brood War was incredibly well optimized and sports a lot of similar features to Factorio (such as 2D sprites instead of 3D unit models), so I think it's easier to compare Factorio to StarCraft than it is to compare it to other RTS games.

It's important to note that flamethrowers and artillery don't actually use a "physics engine" as we know it in video games. All they do is look for the target, see what direction the target is moving in, and fire projectiles at the point where it predicts that enemy will go. There's no "physics" involved -- it's simply doing a quick and basic mathematical calculation.

EDIT: I should also mention that flamethrower and artillery shell projectiles DO arc, but that arc is pre-determined by the target point it is being fired at and where it is being fired from, not by any sort of physics engine. If I'm wrong about this, maybe one of the devs can clear the fog for us; this is what I've gathered based purely on observation, and my own understanding of video game mechanics.