Version 0.17.56

[slippycheeze]

All rail bounding boxes are now hardcoded/not moddable. This is to avoid unexpected collision/rail block merging behaviour.

This is the first time an update has made me hate an update.
Why is this necessary?
Do you hate bridges so much? Or is it simple desire to never see possibly of bug report caused by bad signal layouts with bridges?
I just found and implemented bridges and now they get reacted. I was so exited to play with them this weekend.
welp, updates disabled for now.

Don't get me wrong, you all are awesome, but... why.

I'm not a developer for this game, but I am one elsewhere, and I can tell you exactly why:

I don't care if you used it, though, as long as it didn't break anything else. Sadly, it did, and predictably so.

This is a nice explanation, but it seems to me like an excessive amount of words to say, "you're having fun wrong."

The question was why, which is why a lot of words. Internally the thought process describing that (and which led to my prediction bridges would shortly stop working, apparently correct) was about three bullet points long. Telling people, many of whom have not worked in software development, why I thought that is ... not easy, and many words is the least worst way I know to do that.

Your reading is wrong, though: You are not having fun wrong. I don't think you are, and honestly, you were not.

The shortest possible summary is this: the thing you had fun with, rail bridges, depended on a bug that broken normal rail use several times. Since that bug IS causing other players problems, it needs fixing. Breaking rail bridges is a sad, unfortunate, but not avoidable consequence of fixing that.


In other words: I'm honestly and genuinely sorry you lost rail bridges. Regardless of what I think about them, I'm fine that you can play with them. Enjoy!

I'll also feel the same way you do right now if, for example, inserters can't have pickup or dropoff locations adjusted by mods in the future. I use those, so I'll be annoyed that it went away ... but if it causes problems for people who *don't* bypass that game mechanic with mods, I don't expect my enjoyment to win out over the game working as designed.

[MashTrapper]

All rail bounding boxes are now hardcoded/not moddable. This is to avoid unexpected collision/rail block merging behaviour.

This is the first time an update has made me hate an update.
Why is this necessary?
Do you hate bridges so much? Or is it simple desire to never see possibly of bug report caused by bad signal layouts with bridges?
I just found and implemented bridges and now they get reacted. I was so exited to play with them this weekend.
welp, updates disabled for now.

Don't get me wrong, you all are awesome, but... why.

I'm not a developer for this game, but I am one elsewhere, and I can tell you exactly why:

I don't care if you used it, though, as long as it didn't break anything else. Sadly, it did, and predictably so.

This is a nice explanation, but it seems to me like an excessive amount of words to say, "you're having fun wrong."

The question was why, which is why a lot of words. Internally the thought process describing that (and which led to my prediction bridges would shortly stop working, apparently correct) was about three bullet points long. Telling people, many of whom have not worked in software development, why I thought that is ... not easy, and many words is the least worst way I know to do that.

Your reading is wrong, though: You are not having fun wrong. I don't think you are, and honestly, you were not.

The shortest possible summary is this: the thing you had fun with, rail bridges, depended on a bug that broken normal rail use several times. Since that bug IS causing other players problems, it needs fixing. Breaking rail bridges is a sad, unfortunate, but not avoidable consequence of fixing that.


In other words: I'm honestly and genuinely sorry you lost rail bridges. Regardless of what I think about them, I'm fine that you can play with them. Enjoy!

I'll also feel the same way you do right now if, for example, inserters can't have pickup or dropoff locations adjusted by mods in the future. I use those, so I'll be annoyed that it went away ... but if it causes problems for people who *don't* bypass that game mechanic with mods, I don't expect my enjoyment to win out over the game working as designed.

This is a very good explanation. After listening to another player's rant I was under the impression that rail bridges were intentionally sabotaged by the developers.

It's just an unfortunate, but currently necessary solution to a bad situation.

[Zuzak]

Ok wow. Thanks for the effort in explaining stuff better.
I'll just keep a 17.55 copy to play with trains in strange ways and deconstruct them on primary saves before transitioning primary Factorio version to current.

Maybe the "official" reason explains it better: viewtopic.php?p=441948#p441948

From what I understand, Very Bad Things happen to a map if rail bounding boxes of any entity on the map changes.

No one bad thing comes, it will be ignored or migrated.

Incorrect. If the rails start getting merged when they weren't before it fails the consistency checks and the game will crash on load. That's the main reason why rail bounding boxes where hard coded.

I have run into the consistency check crashes before, accidental bounding issues might have been a cause.
Ok. I'd rather have a dependable stable save [& multiple backups and autosaves] that I can work on for months instead of risking having to restart everything because of unforeseen complication 10 saves back.

[Mr. Tact]

I've been away from the game for a bit. Just jumped back in and updated from 17.17 to 17.56 -- I am getting a crash when, I am traveling by train, I open menu for the train I'm on, I attempt to switch from automatic to manual, BLAM. It blows up. Just me?

[Oktokolo]

Looks like Factorio will only ever support UPS-friendly rail bridges (again) when someone finds out how to patch the exe to reallow bounding box changes.

[Koub]

Looks like Factorio will only ever support UPS-friendly rail bridges (again) when someone finds out how to patch the exe to reallow bounding box changes.

Or maybe a mod maker finds yet another elegant - or ugly - hack to implement bridge-like feature for trains. I'm sure the modifiable bounding boxes were not specifically implemented to allow rail bridge mods, just some smart mod maker figured that this feature could be used to make bridges. Mod makers are good figuring hacks to mod in the most improbable things.

[BlueTemplar]

Is this bridge-like enough ?
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/traintunnels

(congrats for the release !)

(Might be in the "ugly hack" territory though ?...)

[Oktokolo]

Or maybe a mod maker finds yet another elegant - or ugly - hack to implement bridge-like feature for trains. I'm sure the modifiable bounding boxes were not specifically implemented to allow rail bridge mods, just some smart mod maker figured that this feature could be used to make bridges. Mod makers are good figuring hacks to mod in the most improbable things.

Just look at the description of the mod linked by BlueTemplar. That is in the Inserter Fuel Leech category - it has to do all the ugliness with scripts and timing to get a somewhat working result because it tries to mod something that is opaque engine behaviour by design (inserter fuel leech does it with inserters, wich are opaque by design for performance reasons).

Factorio devs accidently implemented no-cost train bridges. No UPS costs. No ugly hacks needed. And then they don't adopt it into vanilla and fix the remaining visual aspects so Factorio has working rail bridges without additional UPS-Costs. Instead they make sure that no one will get zero-cost rail bridges (without patching the exe) ever again.

I know that they did that to prevent further bugs. But seriously, you can't get rail bridges (or tunnels) any cheaper than that. That was the ideal implementation. Every other way to do it will be more complex and way harder to do right. Bounding box modification is in the solar power league UPS-wise. And it is rock stable when done right (meaning you may not change bounding boxes for already placed entities in a map or next map load will fail).

That was all players' chance to get bridges in the game stupidly easy. It was already implemented - in the vanilla train handling. Still can't believe they just threw it away as if devs wouldn't like rail bridges themselves (of course they would, they must want them, everyone likes rails... and bridges). Please devs, you know you want them too... They are just one revert away...

[slippycheeze]

Or maybe a mod maker finds yet another elegant - or ugly - hack to implement bridge-like feature for trains. I'm sure the modifiable bounding boxes were not specifically implemented to allow rail bridge mods, just some smart mod maker figured that this feature could be used to make bridges. Mod makers are good figuring hacks to mod in the most improbable things.

Just look at the description of the mod linked by BlueTemplar. That is in the Inserter Fuel Leech category - it has to do all the ugliness with scripts and timing to get a somewhat working result because it tries to mod something that is opaque engine behaviour by design (inserter fuel leech does it with inserters, wich are opaque by design for performance reasons).

Factorio devs accidently implemented no-cost train bridges. No UPS costs. No ugly hacks needed. And then they don't adopt it into vanilla and fix the remaining visual aspects so Factorio has working rail bridges without additional UPS-Costs. Instead they make sure that no one will get zero-cost rail bridges (without patching the exe) ever again.

I know that they did that to prevent further bugs. But seriously, you can't get rail bridges (or tunnels) any cheaper than that.

I think it is valuable to remember that you can't adjust vanilla inserter pickup or dropoff direction - despite it working perfectly - because it is considered a useful constraint on design by the developers. If they had wanted rail bridges and/or tunnels, I'm pretty sure it would have been done deliberately, and long ago, rather than adopting an accidental side effect to introduce them.

After all, it would be simpler still to have the engine simply ... implement them. Including drawing the layers correctly, etc, which the current one cannot do, and all the other rough edges.

I'm sympathetic to people who miss them, just as I would miss adjustable inserters stuff, but ... I don't believe it is fair to be angry that the developers "turned down" the opportunity created by the bug when they have demonstrated zero interest in the feature to date...

[Oktokolo]

I don't believe it is fair to be angry that the developers "turned down" the opportunity created by the bug when they have demonstrated zero interest in the feature to date...

It is not anger but grief i feel. I am a coder myself and it hurts to see that opportunity just beeing dropped in the bin. It wasn't a hyperbole what i said about the efficiency and ease of implementation of the rail bridge mod. It does not even register an on tick handler...

[Kormer]

Just adding my two cents. I haven't played Factorio in a few years, mainly because I realized I wasn't going to achieve a goal of a nearly 100% railworld. In that time I've been gradually clearing out a backlog of many other games I've wanted to play, knowing that someday some bright modder would figure out how to do proper overpasses and I could start on my dream of the perfect railworld.

It turns out that I was correct, if even for a few brief weeks. I would appreciate it if the developers could continue looking at this to see what can be done to re-enable the feature. Even treating it as a config file option that's clearly "use at your own risk" would be enough to make me happy.

[eradicator]

(Might be in the "ugly hack" territory though ?...)

Teleporting trains around is beyond disgusting. It comes with all sorts of problems especially with very long trains, the least of them being that trains can't path through tunnels automatically because they're dead ends as far as the pathfinder is concerned (and that is already a major problem imho). The beauty of the "bridge" mod was that it didn't have any active scripting at all - the trains were just normal trains.

[slippycheeze]

(Might be in the "ugly hack" territory though ?...)

Teleporting trains around is beyond disgusting. It comes with all sorts of problems especially with very long trains, the least of them being that trains can't path through tunnels automatically because they're dead ends as far as the pathfinder is concerned (and that is already a major problem imho). The beauty of the "bridge" mod was that it didn't have any active scripting at all - the trains were just normal trains.

Yeah, without access to the underlying pathfinding tools to replicate the default train pathfinder, or some way to tell the system that non-coliding rails should be treated as a connected path - including this bug, or whatever random thing let non-touching rails connect - it isn’t practical to do what the bridge thing does.

Without the ability to use the bug, there really isn’t a work-around, I think. Definitely not one that doesn’t involve rewriting either the pathfinder, or train collision in a mod, entirely bypassing the core version. One or the other won’t cope with whatever magic is used to make it “work”.

[Koub]

Why not ask for a modding interface that would allow modders to implement bridges/tunnels/wormholes ? maybe the devs can come with a solution that would be far more elegant than abusing a mechanic that wasn't meant to be used this way all along ?

[eradicator]

Why not ask for a modding interface that would allow modders to implement bridges/tunnels/wormholes ? maybe the devs can come with a solution that would be far more elegant than abusing a mechanic that wasn't meant to be used this way all along ?

Because i'm a jaded desillusioned old man (at least on the inside :p). And so i assume that if they could make it moddable easily, they'd already have made it a vanilla feature.

[Oktokolo]

Why not ask for a modding interface that would allow modders to implement bridges/tunnels/wormholes ? maybe the devs can come with a solution that would be far more elegant than abusing a mechanic that wasn't meant to be used this way all along ?

Apart from my request to give us back the proven-to-work "bug", there is:
Make rail track intersection detector consider collision masks
Let modded rail bounding boxes be larger than vanilla
Railway and Rail Segment controls
Cross surface rail connection

Are these requests too specific?
Should i open a new "allow mods implementing bridges/tunnels/wormholes reliably with low UPS impact" request?

[Koub]

Are these requests too specific?
Should i open a new "allow mods implementing bridges/tunnels/wormholes reliably with low UPS impact" request?

To be honest, I don't know if these are too specific, or totally OK (but unwanted by the devs). However, I'm well aware of a common error : the XY problem (And yeah, I've been working in IT support for 18 years now, so I see this very often).
I'm just saying that maybe asking the devs if they could implement an interface allowing to mod in bridges and/or tunnels and/or whatever between two points of the map, they might come up with a solution that will please everybody, instead of trying to force them into the direction you (modder) think is the best to add a bridge.

There are no guarantees that they will come up with something (or even try to), but what I see in this topic reminds me of the infamous workflow breaking bug correction.

[eradicator]

@Koub:

Nice link, didn't know the "XY problem" had a name. I only have these ~3 years of modding experience, but i feel this every time i write an interface request. And from pure "feeling" the requests where i ask for "my solution" have a far better chance of actually being implemented than the ones where i write a lengthy description of what i'm trying to do. Can't really point my finger at the reason though. Sometimes it's a certain dev not liking what i'm trying to do "on the larger scale", sometimes it's quite obvious that the person answering didn't read the request fully (because too long?), often enough the request might actually be unreasonable, but not knowing the internals i can't possibly know that without asking. It's a difficult issue...

[Oktokolo]

I'm just saying that maybe asking the devs if they could implement an interface allowing to mod in bridges and/or tunnels and/or whatever between two points of the map, they might come up with a solution that will please everybody, instead of trying to force them into the direction you (modder) think is the best to add a bridge.

Okay, this one should be open-ended enough

There are no guarantees that they will come up with something (or even try to), but what I see in this topic reminds me of the infamous workflow breaking bug correction.

The "bug" they fixed, isn't distinguishable from a feature.
They could have written an FFF boasting about their new rail bridges coming to vanilla soon. They could have mentioned that some modder found the secretly implemented API prematurely and that they will only have to fix a map load crash on prototype bounding box updates, get the bridge sprites right and adjust train/entity draw order to get it up to their standard before releasing the full thing. No one would have known that they literally made their engine support zero-cost rail bridges by accident.
Its like when you casually stick a tesa on a graphite lump and suddenly get the nobel prize for inventing Graphene.
It is that absurd - not as absurd as that xkcd comparison though.

[Gergely]

Well what do you know...