Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-312

[ThreePounds]

I applaud the effort to give landfill it's own unique texture, especially because I prefer the dirt / dry dirt textures over grass as it goes better with almost every entity in the game.

However, I think it suffers from the same problem as the old concrete texture: it's prefect grid pattern makes my brain question the tilted projection used by the game's entities. As I recall from the FFF#214 this was one of the reasons for the concrete texture rework. Maybe you guys can find a texture that both looks industrial / man-made and at the same time doesn't rely on grids?

[The_Mell]

I just came here from Steam and tried hard to remember my login to tell the author what a good read this was.
I once spent back at university 2,5h making a 'simple' recursive function work which ended with just 4 lines of code...

I applaud the effort to give landfill it's own unique texture, especially because I prefer the dirt / dry dirt textures over grass as it goes better with almost every entity in the game.

However, I think it suffers from the same problem as the old concrete texture: it's prefect grid pattern makes my brain question the tilted projection used by the game's entities. As I recall from the FFF#214 this was one of the reasons for the concrete texture rework. Maybe you guys can find a texture that both looks industrial / man-made and at the same time doesn't rely on grids?

Maybe instead of these squares i could imagine some type of pushed ground like patterns you see after a bulldozer doing earthmoving.

[Quarnozian]

Request for locked pipes... If there's no fluid in the pipe there should be an indication that it's empty.

For example, with the ALT info on there's a fluid icon on the pipe that has a black background. What if empty pipes had a red background instead?

This way when placing hundreds of underground pipes, and you get to the end and finally hook it up.... and nothing happens... you can run through and immediately spot where the disconnect happened. As opposed to running down the whole length of pipe looking at the tooltip where it goes from empty to full.

[eradicator]

@Dominik:
I was actually watching the bug subforum with a bit of amusement about the regularity of new "I broke the fluid again!" reports. Can totally imagine the evil laughter of boskid :D. No idea had i of your sufferings. I wish you all the best! And that it may end soon. And hopefully you get some extra holiday or a big cake when it's done ;). As for the automatic fixing, wouldn't it be possible to introduce a "clogged" pipe that's actually visible in game?

@Boskid:
Keep up the "evil" (good) work too!
_________

I applaud the effort to give landfill it's own unique texture,

Yes!

However, I think it suffers from the same problem as the old concrete texture: it's prefect grid pattern

I'm more concerned about the "perfectly grid aligned" aspect of the pattern. Looks like 4 mini-tiles per tile, perfectly parralell to normal tiles. Maybe it'd help to turn the grid 45°? or make the lines a bit more wavy.

zaun.jpg (38.9 KiB) Viewed 21846 times

[ThreePounds]

I'm more concerned about the "perfectly grid aligned" aspect of the pattern. Looks like 4 mini-tiles per tile, perfectly parralell to normal tiles. Maybe it'd help to turn the grid 45°? or make the lines a bit more wavy.

I like your idea so I just made a quick mockup to test it out. Here's 45° with 80% height compression to give it some depth:

EDIT: added an e and an t to height

[kbk]

I also was watching the boskid crusade series for quite some time now and hope that once Dominik is done ragethrowing all the tables in the office, the fluid system will eventually become solid (no pun intended).

[Enderdraak]

I'm more concerned about the "perfectly grid aligned" aspect of the pattern. Looks like 4 mini-tiles per tile, perfectly parralell to normal tiles. Maybe it'd help to turn the grid 45°? or make the lines a bit more wavy.

I like your idea so I just made a quick mockup to test it out. Here's 45° with 80% high compression to give it some depth:

It looks nice, but is it possible to make the hight of the diamond less than the width?? to give the viewing angle more legitimacy??

[ThreePounds]

It looks nice, but is it possible to make the hight of the diamond less than the width?? to give the viewing angle more legitimacy??

That's exactly what I did.

[Enderdraak]

That's exactly what I did.

now I see it, maybe a bit more works better??

[Gouldukat]

I'm more concerned about the "perfectly grid aligned" aspect of the pattern. Looks like 4 mini-tiles per tile, perfectly parralell to normal tiles. Maybe it'd help to turn the grid 45°? or make the lines a bit more wavy.

I like your idea so I just made a quick mockup to test it out. Here's 45° with 80% height compression to give it some depth:

EDIT: added an e and an t to height

Wow, why i see Mandelbrot pattern in it ?

[Hornwitser]

Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with this idea that any action by anything anywhere should be prevented if it leads to fluid mixing? It seems silly complicated and overly invasive compared to the alternative, which is to say pipes connect if they they are compatible, and does not connect if they are not compatible (see mockup below). With this method you can even prevent incorrect fluids ending up in your blueprints by having the fluid type of the pipe be a part of the blueprint.

[seludovici]

de·fen·es·tra·tion
/dēˌfenəˈstrāSHən/
noun
1.
FORMAL•HUMOROUS
the action of throwing someone out of a window.
"death by defenestration has a venerable history"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague
The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window)....

[ThreePounds]

Wow, why i see Mandelbrot pattern in it ?

It's an artefact of a quick and dirty tiling technique I used. You can make any texture tile-able by mirroring it along each axis once.

[Gergely]

We all hate refactoring don't we?

Seriously, as a programmer myself, my (jokish) prayer every morning contains: god let there be no refactoring today

[JakubW]

How about making grass spread to dirt after some random time? Like in Minecraft, every tick there is a small chance that one tile of grass would make a neighbor tile of dirt full of grass.

[Trblz]

I'm more concerned about the "perfectly grid aligned" aspect of the pattern. Looks like 4 mini-tiles per tile, perfectly parralell to normal tiles. Maybe it'd help to turn the grid 45°? or make the lines a bit more wavy.

I like your idea so I just made a quick mockup to test it out. Here's 45° with 80% height compression to give it some depth:

Either way it looks better than before but also still artificial.

Maybe we should weather the fresh dirt, let it get overgrown after a while.
Like the dirt path mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Dirt_Path) for all fresh dirt resulting in the nicefill look (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nicefill) over time (days).

[stribika]

What if the underground part of a underground pipes really existed, just didn't connect sideways? It would not be possible for undergrounds to cross each other, one would have to go over the surface. On the other hand, no weird reconnect behavior.

[Gergely]

I have a proposal for underground pipes:

How about making their connections unbreakable by placing another underground pipe in between them?
Let any given underground pipe connect to all underground pipes that are in the direction it's facing, have the opposite orientation, and are within it's range. (and of the same type of course)
This allows more than one connection per underground pipe and it simplifies a lot of logic because removing an underground pipe would never create a new connection, and adding an underground pipe would never remove an already existing connection. This even removes the need for blocked connections because this logic would be equivalent to over-the-ground pipes where it already happens.
Simply, you shouldn't be able to make a new connection by mining a pipe nor remove one by building a pipe. Let this apply to underground pipes as well.

[gorothdablade]

How about making grass spread to dirt after some random time? Like in Minecraft, every tick there is a small chance that one tile of grass would make a neighbor tile of dirt full of grass.

In theory I like that...

But I think that it would be a bit of processing waste for an recapture of manmade to natural, in a purely visual sense