Friday Facts #351 - Beacon re-redesign & Simplified fluid mixing

[RiiDii]

quote

I like the new beacons, but I'm not a big fan of the multiples holes in the ground . It would be interesting to connect them to form a straight line.
In most layouts, the beacons are aligned and stick together, so it would be really interesting to show how to use these beacons and make players want to align them!
In addition, these connections allow you to create a grid that visually organizes the base from a distance.
I made a photoshop to see what it could look like, I hope it will convince you!

before

after

The connection is just a "tile" that fit between two beacons


before


after

Borders are sharper and the beacons darker to make the lines even more visible. I hope you like it!

I like this.

[kirazy]

I like that a lot, actually.

[T-A-R]

That is a little tweak having a great effect of interlocking using the strength of repetition. I like it alot.

[Cooldude2606]

I want to start by saying I like the new design but a few posts have suggested improvements that add the finishing touches.

I really like the reversed version. It's simple, clean and the spike goes from a bit too thin for air transmission to naturally communicating that the device is sending a signal underground.

I agree with this post quite alot. It makes it feel like there is alot of power being transferred using underground wires. A friend of mine has pointed out that when reversed it looks similar to the reactor purge in Alien Isolation which also uses a downwards flow to signify energy being dissipated to the surroundings.

I like the new beacons, but I'm not a big fan of the multiples holes in the ground . It would be interesting to connect them to form a straight line.
Borders are sharper and the beacons darker to make the lines even more visible. I hope you like it!

The final image of all the beacons conneted is really nice and makes the factory feel much more connected. The effect even puts more focus onto the assemblers as there is no longer any contrasting concrete boarders between the beacons.

In my opinion, the fuild clearing should not be instant. I feel that clearing should take time but still be fast, for example 2k per second. To extent this an option to cancel would go along way to stop you from voiding all of your oil reserves by mistake.

Finally, as a factorio server hoster, I need to know if there will be a input action linked to fluid clearing. I need to have a viable method of countering a player who joins with the solo intention of harming the factory, such as clearing all the oil from storage tanks or stream from backup power stores.

[5thHorseman]

quote

before


after

I actually prefer the "Before" picture. Though I like how the assemblers pop in the "After" picture, the beacons themselves don't look right to me. It looks like someone just copy/pasted a texture that's too small to tile well and then drew the rest of the factory over it.

I like the idea. Just not the implementation. Not sure how to change the implementation to fix that though.

[Impatient]

Finally, as a factorio server hoster, I need to know if there will be a input action linked to fluid clearing. I need to have a viable method of countering a player who joins with the solo intention of harming the factory, such as clearing all the oil from storage tanks or stream from backup power stores.

+1 that, because the griefer pest is part of gaming life.

[zymurg]

The new beacon design is super cool. I love it. The tubes look great.

There are really only 2 minor concerns I can think of:

The vertical separation between beacons is larger than the horizontal separation, and I feel like that could get annoying

The module placement is a bit wonky. It feels like the nearest module sticks out a bit too much at the top.

[psychomuffin]

I've said it once, I'll say it again. When people complain about change, devs often make the excuse that people don't like change. They ignore the fact that their change was for the worse. But when someone does change right, people LOVE IT! And once again, these are GREAT changes! The thought and refinement you put in all make great sense. Thank you so much for your FFFs, and telling us your design thoughts!!! I would try to give critiques or nit-pick, but I can't think of anything! (although I do like idea of a contiguous 'pit' that some are proposing)

[Chaoseed]

I don't think I've ever even built any beacons...

[V453000]

quote

I like the new beacons, but I'm not a big fan of the multiples holes in the ground . It would be interesting to connect them to form a straight line.
In most layouts, the beacons are aligned and stick together, so it would be really interesting to show how to use these beacons and make players want to align them!
In addition, these connections allow you to create a grid that visually organizes the base from a distance.
I made a photoshop to see what it could look like, I hope it will convince you!

before

after

The connection is just a "tile" that fit between two beacons


before


after

Borders are sharper and the beacons darker to make the lines even more visible. I hope you like it!

Thank you for your post, it's visible you put some thought and effort in to it.

We were originally considering some kind of tiling of beacons I really like the basic idea of it, but:
- it doesn't Really make gameplay sense, the beacons don't interact with each other at all, they just add towards the close by machines, which is representative with separate units
- it's quite a big complication. In the image you posted, it's all seemingly simple because all beacons are sharing their sides completely. Once they would start being offset by 1 or 2 tiles, there would start being a lot more variations and it would just get too much
So we chose the pragmatic solution to just keep it relatively simple.

Maybe some day...

[Filter62]

Well, that's better design. One but though, I prefer to have alt-mode (Modules not always visible without it), and I never want to use mods (It's personal, I prefer to play games as they were intended to be played)

[FluffDaSheep]

I don't like the new beacons because they look like they belong in a different game.

• The pit doesn't match the rest of the game's above-ground aesthetic. Instead of an endgame sprawling metropolis of production and pollution, I'll have a bunch of holes in the ground? Not nearly as impressive.
• The thin spike doesn't match the jury-rigged, robust, chunky design of all other entities.
• The mess of fat brown tubes and grey metal is just ugly.

Maybe if you got rid of the hole in the ground, made the cables a bit nicer, and made them spiral up the tower a bit?

[Templarfreak]

Can we still have the previous redesign available in the game assets? I'd hate for it to go to waste, it still looks quite nice and maybe it can find a different use (Maybe in that weird tower defense minigame for instance, as some kind of defensive structure?)

For the current redesign, I think it would also be great if there was like a glass pane above it? Then you could reasonably give it a VERY SMALL entity-to-player collision, as most of it is underground that you can walk ontop of the pane to walk across it, allowing players to much more easily walk around in setups covered in beacons.

It would even help to make it stand against the other entities without actually drawing much more attention, being one of the only entities in the game to make use of visible glass thus making it more recognizable and unique-looking, but despite that I feel like it would still draw attention away from itself.

I would also appreciate a mechanical redesign to beacons and modules. It's such an old mechanic that hasn't seen any attention since its introduction in the game. I've always felt like beacons had a lot of mechanical potential that is not realized. There are also some mechanical problems and improvements that could be made IMO:

Efficiency Modules are often less efficient than some other option. For instance, speed moduling Assembling Machines with Efficiency on Beacons. In that case, it is more energy-efficient to NOT have the Beacons at all. This is pretty counter-productive, since the point of Efficiency Modules is to reduce energy usage and pollution creation and in this case it is worse in both cases by using efficiency modules on beacons.

Some things that feel like they should be productivity moduled can't be. For instance items used as ingredients but aren't an Intermediate Product, like pipes. They feel like they're oddly limited for no reason. I don't think a redesign of recipes that use these things should take place, though. It makes sense to use pipes in the recipes its used in. So with no new intermediate product to introduce to replace pipes in its recipes, it makes more sense to allow pipes to be productivity moduled. Or do something totally new here that makes moduling things such as pipes, belts, inserters, or production facilities, more interesting. For instance, speed is pretty pointless to put on things like Inserters and Belts. They build so fast anyway and if you need any more production for them for recipes adding more is pretty trivial since they'll by-far take up the least amount of space.

Why not let players go more crazy with modules, like productivity moduleing modules for instance? Or many other items? I experimented with this in my own mod and it adds a whole lot more to them. There's so many new things you have to consider when it comes to modules this way. This is because there's a lot more things competing for their use. This is one change, to add more things that can be productivity moduled.

What if beacons could use Productivity Modules in some way? What if Modules/Beacons could interact with defenses? Or other entities like players and biters or things on belts? What if the circuit network could control beacons more directly (instead of just flipping a power switch on or off to connect or disconnect beacons)? Like switching sets of modules? Or what if beacons had more purposes than only distributing module bonuses?

There's so much potential with beacons. At least a look over or talk about them could be nice.

[aljo]

quote

I like the new beacons, but I'm not a big fan of the multiples holes in the ground . It would be interesting to connect them to form a straight line.
In most layouts, the beacons are aligned and stick together, so it would be really interesting to show how to use these beacons and make players want to align them!
In addition, these connections allow you to create a grid that visually organizes the base from a distance.
I made a photoshop to see what it could look like, I hope it will convince you!

before

after

The connection is just a "tile" that fit between two beacons


before


after

Borders are sharper and the beacons darker to make the lines even more visible. I hope you like it!

I'm not sure why I couldn't see it before, but these images just really highlighted for me just how much the beacons look like piles of trash when zoomed out (a literal garbage dump). Wow do I dislike the new beacons now. Maybe it'll look better at full res on my monitor, but I'm unconvinced.

[Usul]

Overall I love the new beacon design! However I would prefer a small ball-end to the antenna instead of spike.

[bmmtstb]

I quite like the new Beacon design. Yes it takes getting used to, but every change will.
The only thing i was wondering about, in the first design without the tower in it, one can clearly see "copper pipes" on the north and south side of the beacon. What about giving beacons the possibility to connect to each other via these orange brown tubes? It looks like for upright columns it would already work, not for sideways (like you showed everytime in the FFF). There are multiple cases now (|, -, T, +, ...) but in my opinion this would help the use of multi beacon designs, because the beacons work together to speed up (in most cases) one entity together. [Edit: I just noticed Oxil made a visual of what I was trying to explain... but I would keep the entetys more separated somehow.]



Thanks for the clear pipe button. When is it visible? What if I want to drain a storage tank to get rid of some fluids, is there a button too?

[AK90]

The new beacon doesnt fit in with the game, it looks too futuristic. I dont like it

[DrParanoia]

I don't like the new beacons because they look like they belong in a different game.

• The pit doesn't match the rest of the game's above-ground aesthetic. Instead of an endgame sprawling metropolis of production and pollution, I'll have a bunch of holes in the ground? Not nearly as impressive.
• The thin spike doesn't match the jury-rigged, robust, chunky design of all other entities.
• The mess of fat brown tubes and grey metal is just ugly.

Maybe if you got rid of the hole in the ground, made the cables a bit nicer, and made them spiral up the tower a bit?

Also this

[Oxyl.]

quote

I like the new beacons, but I'm not a big fan of the multiples holes in the ground . It would be interesting to connect them to form a straight line.
In most layouts, the beacons are aligned and stick together, so it would be really interesting to show how to use these beacons and make players want to align them!
In addition, these connections allow you to create a grid that visually organizes the base from a distance.
I made a photoshop to see what it could look like, I hope it will convince you!

before

after

The connection is just a "tile" that fit between two beacons


before


after

Borders are sharper and the beacons darker to make the lines even more visible. I hope you like it!

Thank you for your post, it's visible you put some thought and effort in to it.

We were originally considering some kind of tiling of beacons I really like the basic idea of it, but:
- it doesn't Really make gameplay sense, the beacons don't interact with each other at all, they just add towards the close by machines, which is representative with separate units
- it's quite a big complication. In the image you posted, it's all seemingly simple because all beacons are sharing their sides completely. Once they would start being offset by 1 or 2 tiles, there would start being a lot more variations and it would just get too much
So we chose the pragmatic solution to just keep it relatively simple.

Maybe some day...

Thank you for your answer,

I understand your concern about interaction but it's like walls: walls don't interact with each other, however strait lines is the most commun layout just because it's convenient. The junction between two units is only a visual reference that highlights a common use. If you don't want to make lines, you should be free to do any shape. If the beacons don't completely share their side, the connection will not occur, so the unit will be a simple 3x3 build, that's fine. You dont need this connection but it add a nice touch to the re-design.

Hopefully some day will come...

[Filter62]

Wonderful ideas and I look forward to both.
May the devs forgive me, but I have to ask:
1. Can the pipe flushing be automatic when pipes are disconnected from all fluid sources (such as Offshore Pumps, Refineries, Chemical Plants, and Fluid Tanks)?
2. Can pipe flushing be conditionally circuited?
3. Can the fluid source be disconnected using circuited fluid pumps (when the upstream pump is turned off, the fluid is disconnected)?

This would allow folks to go crazy with using pipes for multiple fluids, just only one fluid at a time.
Though, preventing mixing might be more complicated. Perhaps, a pump could detect both in/out fluids are the same before it turns on.

About first - Just no. I don't want to lose all fluid in the system to some mistake.