Friday Facts #331 - 0.18.0 release & Train pathfinder changes

[RobertTerwilliger]

Campaign cancelled

That's... unexpected... and disturbing.
I mean, campaign was always there, providing some different experience, despite being inconsistent, and now loosing something feels worse than not ever having it at all.

Thinking about games' campaigns in general, many of them do not duplicate "proper way to play". They have many levels, dedicated to almost another genre!
Naming some examples: Age of Empires series, Command&Conquer series, Warcraft 3, Starcraft series, and so on. All these named strategy games have "refreshing" levels of pure tactic game, where you have no base and should rely on operating limited units to cleverly get through normally-outnumbering force.
There is a downside though: personally I almost haven't played skirmish, as campaign walkthrough was much more entertaining : )

[knightelite]

Any thoughts on whether the pathfinder changes had addressed this particular issue: viewtopic.php?f=29&t=67034

I might have to fire up 0.18 and test it to see if it still happens .

[credomane]

Personally, I love the idea of crowd sourcing the tutorials, or at least a good body of the work. Something about it just seems right, and I would jump at the opportunity to help out in any way I could. I'm sure others feel the same.

Agreed. Maybe even a few different "types". A "how-to begin" tutorial that guides the player though all the basics like other games do; such as movement/combat, building basics (build/pick-up/change recipes), copy-n-paste settings, blueprints. Then a more advanced tutorial that takes a player through some of the challenges they will face; automation, defending their base from biters, setting up outposts, trains networks, robots, etc. Finally a bad ass fully functional campaign that has the player in an already large functioning base with npcs that more or less explains how your were sent to nauvis (read freeplay mode) and the disaster that occurred on final descent leaving you stranded with nothing but an emergency kit (burner miner, stone furnace, couple iron plates, loaded pistol with some extra magazines).

[Solinya]

We made 0.18 a major version because it will break mods with all the changes we are making, and while initially it hasn't broken that much, many things to come will have a bigger impact, such as the Character GUI.

Does this mean that later 0.18.x releases will break mods again? I think you should try to break mods only with major versions otherwise there will be a huge mess

I used to have this stance, but after thinking about it the past few days as part of the multi-version mod compatibility discussion, I think if they did that, it would severely crimp Wube's productivity. If you could only introduce breaking changes in a .0, then you either have to hold the next .0 until all the features you want in are ready or delay features until the next .0 (which will then be held for all features going into that .0). The result is releases become slower, bigger, and further apart again - which is the opposite of the rapid development strategy they're trying to adopt.

And even if they did release faster, having to update mods seven times a year just to bump up the version number is more annoying than updating 1-2 times a year for the version number plus an additional time or two for a breaking experimental change. Not all major versions break all mods.

I think the current approach of "potential breaking changes until first stable" is a fine compromise so long as the breaking changes are communicated in advance, so modders have time to prepare.

[Spiff]

I am really saddened to hear the campaign is cancelled. In RTS games, I typically play the campaign and mostly ignore skirmish. Well-made campaigns have more gameplay variety and encourage the player to use strategies that they might otherwise ignore. I was waiting until the full campaign was released to review the game or add it to my curator page.

[eterevsky]

Now that 0.18 is out (in beta), I wonder what will happen to Industrial Revolution mod? It's no longer compatible with the latest version of Factorio, and the author apparently doesn't want to support it or release it for other potential maintainers. It's really sad, since IR is the highest-quality Factorio mod that I've seen so far.

I wonder if Wube considered buying out the mod from from Deadlock989 and releasing it in some form? I'd be prepared to buy it as a DLC or somethings.

[Quarnozian]

Campaign cancelled - V453000

What if the "campaign" took place within a specific freeplay world (A specific seed, instead of randomly generated), and basically acted like a tutorial? Player could start next to their crash site with Compilatron, and the collapsed remains of previous bases would be scattered about in various directions and distances. Compilatron would give the player objectives to complete at their current location, then guide them to the next set of ruins to explore/rebuild. Biter expansion should probably be left off.

Instead of storing the whole map, just use the specific map seed with default world generation values. Then you only need to load the seed and apply all the campaign ruins to the map so Compilatron has places to send the players.

Then players can choose to follow Compilatrons instructions exactly, OR choose their own priorities and play their own way.

Only concern... if some of compilatrons instructions are to construct certain things, the script should check to see if they have already been made before telling the player something that makes no sense. For example, player decided to go off script for a bit to build base defenses... Then they start following Compilatrons instructions again, and one of the upcoming objectives Compilatron has scripted is to ask the player to build defenses. Before the objective pops up, a check should be performed to see if all the objectives have already been met.

Issue 7: repathing would clear a train's counter of ticks waiting on signal.

This seems to explain why trains would just sit idle for several seconds in my train stackers despite there being available train stops for them to travel to. I'm glad this is being fixed, because that was pretty frustrating. lol

[ownlyme]

i'm glad you didn't change the inventory/controller gui, would have been a pain in the butt to calculate the new dimensions for my market mod...

[Philip017]

i personally dont see anything wrong with the current character gui

best wishes to dominik in his future endeavours

I would hope that the fluid optimizations would make 1.0, i know it will be tough and time consuming, but i know you have the people with the skill to do it.

boskid you have worked on alot of bug fixing and these train optimizations are quite the work up. your work is thorough and attentive to the fine details of the train changes, im sure if there are any side issues that pop up (hopefully there wont be any) that you will be able to solve them. thank you for your contributions. i know you worked with some of the fluid issues previously, perhaps you can take a crack at, if you aren't too busy, at the problem with fluids being such a cpu hog, at least they are supposed to now eat spare cpu cores instead of hogging all of the main thread, perhaps even delayed by a tick or two, or at least thats the way i understand it to be?

campaign canceled?? i know you want to get more polish into the game and will consider adding a campaign after 1.0, so i look forward to revisiting it at that time, imo instead of saying campaign canceled, i suggest wording it a little different, campaign placed on hold until after 1.0 release, to be revisited at a later date. either way i look forward to playing with whatever you come up with and giving you my feedback at that time. until then there are mods that add a campaign like feel with a story of their own.

[Hiladdar]

I'm glad Webe is doing triage on what to officially release for version 1.0. This is a great tool to mitigate scope creep in an application.

In a way I am saddened to not have a Campaign game as part of the main release. But given my experience in learning this game, I do not believe this is a major drawback. This will be more of a marketing issue. A way to mitigate it would be for either mod developer to either come up with a campaign game. As an alternative, the campaign game might end up being DLC after release 1.0.

Regarding the game breaking stuff. First off, as a mod developer and player, I reserve the right to gripe and complain about mod breaking and big changes. Thanks for the heads up, this way I can dust off my my old copy "winGripe.exe" to automatically generate complaints to cut and paste. Seriously, the best analogy I can come up with is that this is the birthing pains for a version 1.0, no way to avoid, and it has to happen.

Hiladdar

[ThorsDragon]

I find it not appropriate to describe Dominik's departure in the way you did it.

How else should we handle it? I want to be as transparent and honest with you as I can be.

I appreciate the honesty. Dominik had been around around a long time, right? It's sad to see him go. I really hope things go well for him!

[ThorsDragon]

I'm glad Webe is doing triage on what to officially release for version 1.0. This is a great tool to mitigate scope creep in an application.

In a way I am saddened to not have a Campaign game as part of the main release. But given my experience in learning this game, I do not believe this is a major drawback. This will be more of a marketing issue. A way to mitigate it would be for either mod developer to either come up with a campaign game. As an alternative, the campaign game might end up being DLC after release 1.0.

Regarding the game breaking stuff. First off, as a mod developer and player, I reserve the right to gripe and complain about mod breaking and big changes. Thanks for the heads up, this way I can dust off my my old copy "winGripe.exe" to automatically generate complaints to cut and paste. Seriously, the best analogy I can come up with is that this is the birthing pains for a version 1.0, no way to avoid, and it has to happen.

Hiladdar

I like you're approach Hiladdar. xD And your mods are great btw!! And agreed on doing triage for 1.0 release.

[ThorsDragon]

I am really saddened to hear the campaign is cancelled. In RTS games, I typically play the campaign and mostly ignore skirmish. Well-made campaigns have more gameplay variety and encourage the player to use strategies that they might otherwise ignore. I was waiting until the full campaign was released to review the game or add it to my curator page.

This isn't a typical RTS, I don't think. RTS's will typically punish you (in competitive multiplayer especially) for getting too many upgrades in my experience. Sure, PvP Factorio will similar in that regard- a super upgraded machine gun in a car won't get upgraded enough to take out a tank that has been rushed; however, Factorio is usually PvE, at least for me. As for as PvE goes, you won't get punished for researching upgrades if you're doing it horrendously inefficiently. Even a slightly proficient factory will output enough science to get upgrades at roughly the same rate that pollution will attract biters. I will never consider Factorio to be in the same vein as RTS's. The pacing is drastically different, and I have never felt like these absolutely-amazing-best-devs-ever have ever tried to push Factorio in a RTS direction.

[ThorsDragon]

Now that 0.18 is out (in beta), I wonder what will happen to Industrial Revolution mod? It's no longer compatible with the latest version of Factorio, and the author apparently doesn't want to support it or release it for other potential maintainers. It's really sad, since IR is the highest-quality Factorio mod that I've seen so far.

I wonder if Wube considered buying out the mod from from Deadlock989 and releasing it in some form? I'd be prepared to buy it as a DLC or somethings.

I agree - IR is a VERY well done mod. Kudos to the mod author, unfortunate to hear he's done with it? if I'm understanding you correctly.

[Therax]

After a quick prototyping phase, I decided to implement a binary heap with min-property over array.

Out of curiosity, did you evaluate a 4-way d-ary heap? In practice it's usually faster for A-star searches due to better alignment with cache behavior.

[Jap2.0]

Campaign cancelled - V453000

What if the "campaign" took place within a specific freeplay world (A specific seed, instead of randomly generated), and basically acted like a tutorial?

Then... wouldn't it be a tutorial not a campaign? I'm not really seeing anything to differentiate it in your post.

[boskid]

After a quick prototyping phase, I decided to implement a binary heap with min-property over array.

Out of curiosity, did you evaluate a 4-way d-ary heap? In practice it's usually faster for A-star searches due to better alignment with cache behavior.

No, i went straight into binary heap since it is super easy to implement over array and that was enough to gain performance here. Most of performance gain was however due to heuristic being added to Dijkstra (which technicaly previously was A* with trivial heuristic of h(x)=0, now heuristic is about 10 lines long)

[luc]

From what I understand it was a perfectly amicable decision, he was happy and relieved, optimistic about new projects for him to work on, and that mostly he feels bad about leaving us at the last minute, but that he decided it was the best for everyone

Wow, okay, that paints an entirely different picture than the post. Not even sure there is a possible interpretation from the FFF that matches your comment. The FFF basically says:

- We delayed .18 twice already
- After reviewing the work done so far, we had to throw most of it out
- Then we kicked the developer off of that project and just started over with another one
- After replacing him and throwing away his code, he quit his job (implying this was all against his will)

And after he was kicked out for doing a bad job you also wanted to tell the world about it, or so it sounds like.

So when you then write that he was happy and felt bad about suddenly having to leave, imagine my confusion

I agreed with what Raphaello wrote about this not being cool, but I see that it was meant very differently. Isn't it also a thing in Czech to sugarcoat past relations just a little to sound thankful for all the work someone has done over the years? (Unless, of course, that is really not the case or if they actively sabotaged things or whatever, but that's not something I expect to apply here.) Or is that just a difference between German and Czech cultures?

[OrchidAlloy]

I'm quite concerned that the new fluid mechanics won't be making it into 1.0 (or even at all?). Currently, fluids are definitely the most under-developed part of the game. They're quite unwieldy, hard to read and plan about, hard to use, hard to debug, and just unpleasant overall. Transporting the water for any size of nuclear reactor that works at full capacity is such a chore that the only courses of action are either to spam pumps or build it in the middle of a lake to begin with. As they stand, the current fluid mechanics personally don't feel worthy of a 1.0 release.

This Friday Facts is the bleakest I've ever read. All plans for a Campaign completely scratched, features being delayed, and a team member suddenly quitting. And it really really sounds like Dominik left on bad terms. It sounds like you're blaming him for the character GUI not working out, and that he quit out of frustration. You said that's not what you meant, and that he left on good terms, but that's the complete opposite of how the original statement reads.

All in all, I hope 1.0 will turn out okay despite all complications, and that Dominik is happy on his future projects. This game is incredible and so are its developers, and I've always felt that they could have branded the game as 1.0 months or years ago. But I trust their vision. Good luck, and I hope my comment is considered.

[eterevsky]

Now that 0.18 is out (in beta), I wonder what will happen to Industrial Revolution mod? It's no longer compatible with the latest version of Factorio, and the author apparently doesn't want to support it or release it for other potential maintainers. It's really sad, since IR is the highest-quality Factorio mod that I've seen so far.

I wonder if Wube considered buying out the mod from from Deadlock989 and releasing it in some form? I'd be prepared to buy it as a DLC or somethings.

I agree - IR is a VERY well done mod. Kudos to the mod author, unfortunate to hear he's done with it? if I'm understanding you correctly.

Yes: viewtopic.php?p=472490#p472490. Also the license under which he released the mod doesn't allow publishing derivative work.