Friday Facts #271 - Fluid optimisations & GUI Style inspector

[fishycat]

I like the "color-correctness" of chest and inserters, but as a new player you could think, each chest uses its own grabbers.

Also what are these two buggers doing there? Looks like they're having fun.

[Mehve]

Love hearing about improvements to the fluid system. Been taking a break for awhile now, but the slow-downs associated with mega-scale nuclear was a little discouraging back then, so I'm definitely looking forward to breaking ground in 0.17!

I don't think I ever saw this referenced, but do the nuclear heat pipes represent a similar calculation load?

[5thHorseman]

You find the cut off inserter hand and gear, but but don't think the long handed inserter is totally wrong?
It removes from the furnace and places into the arithmetic combinator.

And the refinery input is connected to the input side of a pump, which is filled with lubricant, and that is fed into a heat exchanger.

And the output of the heat exchanger is linked to one of the refinery outputs, and nothing else.

So nobody should use this poster as a tutorial.

So long as it's visually fine, I don't see why it needs to make sense.

[Lizzy]

The poster is gorgeous! I fully expect to use oil refineries to produce liquid uranium; use construction bots to increase the speed of electric furnaces; and hire biters as train maintenance staff.

The Wube logo looks cool, but it doesn't have much of a silhouette; it won't be recognizable in a 16x16 favicon. And that's just an example, there are several other situations where company logos are made tiny. I suggest you guys to tweak that.

[guzwaatensen]

About fluid simulation:

I was wondering that also at a previous FFF that talked about Fluid handling a while ago. It seems that you are simulating every entity individually and then you changed it to (or wanted to change it to) a node based simulation. Why are you not drawing the distinction between unsaturated pipes and saturated pipes additionally?

Pipes that are not full of liquid you handle with your current system, but for pipes that are full (enough input to saturate all outputs) you only need to simulate end points. You need to draw a map of sorts once, and then as long as the player doesn't touch that specific pipe network you can just use a steady state model to simulate flow from inputs to outputs.

Or am I missing some crucial part, pretty sure you pondered that specific problem at length...

[Serenity]

I fully expect to use oil refineries to produce liquid uranium

No, he is burning lube in the heat exchanger

[FasterJump]

Can't wait to see the new fluid system! I hope it's behavior will be realistic enough.

And I hope that fluids (water and steam) won't be the bottleneck of nuclear setups anymore!

My 1k spm base with screenshots, blueprints and save game

[Jonathan88]

I love the high resolution poster! I think the track ends a little too early though and should continue off the edge - having the signal directly before the buffers seems a bit odd (even to the un-factorio-trained eye) Anyone might think the track is a bit pointless just cutting through everything before randomly terminating...

[vedrit]

So, how do fluid tanks figure in? A lot of people complain that they're inefficient UPS-wise. Do they count as a separate entity, like an assembly machine or miner? Do they split pipe segments?

[Lubricus]

About fluid simulation:

I was wondering that also at a previous FFF that talked about Fluid handling a while ago. It seems that you are simulating every entity individually and then you changed it to (or wanted to change it to) a node based simulation. Why are you not drawing the distinction between unsaturated pipes and saturated pipes additionally?

Pipes that are not full of liquid you handle with your current system, but for pipes that are full (enough input to saturate all outputs) you only need to simulate end points. You need to draw a map of sorts once, and then as long as the player doesn't touch that specific pipe network you can just use a steady state model to simulate flow from inputs to outputs.

Or am I missing some crucial part, pretty sure you pondered that specific problem at length...

The producers and consumers don't produce and consume at steady pace. The machines are consuming and producing when recipes is starting and ending. So the pipes can't be full all the time, they have to buffer. The fluid boxes in the machines is also working as pipes, an solution could maybe be that the fluid boxes in the machines works different than the pipes and is the only buffers?

[nagapito]

I mean, the poster does not represent actual gameplay that makes sense, but this should propably be fixed:
(the cut off inserster "hand")

Fixed, thanks for the hint.

Can we get a very high resolution of this image?

[T-A-R]

All the entities on the picture are just washed and clean for the picture:p Too clean if you ask me. It misses some layer of dirt to temper the bright colours.
With this picture, the game should be sold in a box!

Great to hear about the fluid progress.

[Albert]

Can we get a very high resolution of this image?

There's no higher resolution. In fact the image has the same resolution as the game in HR. This ¨poster¨ is intended to be a small banner. I've prepared the image for printing and this is the highest we can get with the game sprites without re-rendering.

All the entities on the picture are just washed and clean for the picture:p Too clean if you ask me. It misses some layer of dirt to temper the bright colours.
With this picture, the game should be sold in a box!

There's the same amount of dirt. The only difference is the saturation of color. I just added some sugar to the Factorio look.
And yes, concerning the picture I was thinking in the box of a physical copy of the game. Something that maybe never happens, but I would love so much to do.

[ohmusama]

I was thinking in the box of a physical copy of the game. Something that maybe never happens, but I would love so much to do.

I've already bought this game, clearly, but I'd buy it again if I could have a CE Box with some extra loot. Vinyl model of a Rocket Silo anyone?

[Philip017]

i look forward to seeing the fluid changes completed and the final results being better over all.

i have to wonder how these changes will impact multiplayer,
as each client has to render the game simultaneously...
- will the game throttle based on how the lowest performing client?
- or will any client(s) that can not keep up with the server be disconnected?
- will everyone have to have at least the minimal number of threads?
- what would be the minimal number of threads? would that be configurable in the config?
- should the server be much faster than most of the clients connecting and the game throttles to the lowest performing client, there should be a minimum that is configurable in the config, otherwise someone connecting with a slow laptop would make the game too slow for everyone else.
i think that factorio should really be utilizing multiple cores to better performance, even in multiplayer.
per core performance is not going to be increasing that much going forward in technology, the focus looks to be more cores, because of the mhz bottleneck of current silicon.

these things probably should be figured out and brought up in a FFF near 17's release.

Thanks again for all your hard work making this wonderful game.

[Philip017]

I was thinking in the box of a physical copy of the game. Something that maybe never happens, but I would love so much to do.

I've already bought this game, clearly, but I'd buy it again if I could have a CE Box with some extra loot. Vinyl model of a Rocket Silo anyone?

3D printed rocket silo, yes make it for sale. i know you sell t-shirts, but if the demand for the belt key chains does well, perhaps a rocket silo model for our shelves would be nice as well. something to think about.

also i need a 3x t-shirt

[nagapito]

Can we get a very high resolution of this image?

There's no higher resolution. In fact the image has the same resolution as the game in HR. This ¨poster¨ is intended to be a small banner. I've prepared the image for printing and this is the highest we can get with the game sprites without re-rendering.

Maybe then its time for a re-rendering...
Coz I would pay to have this framed on my wall!
I was asking for an hi-res exactly for that!

[bobucles]

I mean, the poster does not represent actual gameplay that makes sense, but this should propably be fixed:
(the cut off inserster "hand")

The inserter is adding items into the requester chest? Literally unplayable.

[TheVeteraNoob]

I think that this poster is a challenge to experienced factorio players to find everything that is wrong with it. Because there are quite a few.

-Long inserter. Pointing out of a passive provider, also would never be able to connect.
-Lubricant coming out of an oil refinery. Then gets heated up in a heat exchanger. and is inputted back into the same refinary.
-Centerfuge with no discernable input or output.
-Fully compressed belt yellow belt of gears and nuclear fuel has a gear on the wrong side on the output.
-Lubricant pipe on the right side spans too far to be able to have an output (I think, I forget the exact tile count, but it looks too far)
-Lastly, the speaker has no wire connection.

Edit: And the gates are pointless

[Lizzy]

I fully expect to use oil refineries to produce liquid uranium

No, he is burning lube in the heat exchanger

I'm quite sure that the heat exchanger is performing the new Glex Uranium Enrichment Process, the newer, better replacement version of Kovarex Enrichment. I wouldn't be surprised if it needed lube as a second catalyst.