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

[catma]

PLEASE make the original red tower available for mods, in all its glory.

The one-new-building modders are often stopped by not having a non-basegame building to use in their first mode with their code, and having a placeholder can be spectacularly useful.

P.S.: there is probably a hundred other discarded concepts for other buildings that could be useful for modding and mod testing, can we get a top 20 of the ones that were internal-only so far but FAR too much fun to hide forever??

[QWERTY128BITS]

Suggestion: New technology: fluid separator... Maybe some fluid lost on process...
Leave the player decide if he wants or not.
Mix the fluid could let to a another tech or benefits.
Automated everything...
Player choice

[IIIByoIII]

As always, thank you for listening to the community.
I really like the new beacon design and fluid flushing.
Great work! Keep it up! We love you!

[PhasmaNL]

As always, thank you for listening to the community.
I really like the new beacon design and fluid flushing.
Great work! Keep it up! We love you!

I was about to say pretty much the exact same thing. So; +1

[pr0n]

The delete button is a major 4th wall breaker imho. It would be much more elegant to add a gas flare or burn off tower item that lets players vent fluids. It could have a color changing spray or flame depending on whats being vented.

[Rahbek]

Usually I comment here to add my feedback and criticism - this time I just wanna say that both changes are great Looking forward to use them both!
Especially the Beacon now feels like it fits exactly with its purpose both in game as well as in the way it is displayed without visual clutter. Love it! Huge upgrade

[dgls]

https://pasteboard.co/JcUUUwK.jpg
Could just fill a barrel whit existing key F

[Cooldude2606]

Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Oxyl made a great response to your points. I want to suggest something specifically towards your first point.
I want to suggest that beacons interact with each other in a simple way such as reducing power consumption when directly adjacent.
There was a post describing how efficienly modules in beacons lead to an increase in total power consumption, an efficieny bonus could mitigate this.

They could share power with each other, which would make sense because of the cables, but since no other entity does this it would break theming.
Additional modules slots could be made available when directly adjacent, you can see Oxyl's design has 1 extra slot between the beacons.
However, this would be game changing in terms of the additional bonus, and I imagine it would be hard to implement.

To mirror Oxyl, Hopefully some day.

[Hiladdar]

I like the ideas several others have proposed of simplifying the design of the beacon, and having the modules displayed as an overlay in alt mode. I still think the new beacon intricacy should be toned down a bit.

Hiladdar

[zero318]

Do the less strict mixing rules mean the new fluid system could be a possibility again? I'm still looking forward to the day that flow rate properties will be reintroduced.

[Xehlwan]

...
2. Use this version:

I agree completely. This design -without the antenna- looks great! Put the electric effect on the cables instead, and this would be perfect, in my opinion!

It really looks as if it somehow connects all the utilities around, and hints at a much more advanced structure beneath the factory. As a bonus, this design would make sense to be walkable, which would be a very nice QoL feature.

[skuester]

I joined the forums specifically to give feedback on the previous Beacon design. I love this re-redesign. Well done! It's awesome that you guys take feedback to heart!

[pulzar]

Nice! I was a bit scared about what the beacon will end up looking like after the last proposal.. but you guys did a great job listening to feedback and coming up with something very good!

[Durentis]

Excellent change in beacon design!

I like the ideas of reversing the electric animation and merging adjacent beacons.

Still with the spike, though it's much better than in the red design. I wonder if taking the shorter antennae from that design would have been better, especially if they arc between each other and the pulse goes down into the hole.

[xenoscepter]

* I have >5 hours of coding experience, so take this with a heavy does of tongue in cheek. I just hope to contribute to the discussion, sometimes an idiot outsider might pick out things that someone with years of experience missed. The "Ya know, that might just be crazy enough to work..." kind of thing. Great job on the game, hyped for V1.0! *

What if you had a unique Entity/Script to stop fluid mixing?

Entity A is generated at the point of connection between the Pipe and the thing which gives it fluids.

Let's say that it's an Offshore Water Pump. So Offshore Water Pump is given a tag, let's just call it, "Fluid_Water" So Entity A checks for the tag and says, "Ok. I am 'Fluid_Water' ", but... Uh-Oh! Now the Pump Jack wants to put Crude Oil into it!

Not Today! Entity A saves the day by going, "Stop! You've violated the law! This is a 'Fluid_Water' Pipe!"
...And so it was saved... Supposedly.

Create a priority for different fluids and a script that checks them so that in case some new player decides to mix, oh say.... Light Oil and Petroleum Gas, for the purposes of "sifting" them later with pumps and they choose to create a Blueprint for this genius creation that would attach them both at the same time then they decide to put it down and the robots just so happen to make both connections in the precise same tick: this is where the prioirty would help, since if Light Oil has a priority over Petroleum Gas, the Light Oil would connect successfully and the game could throw a "You cannot mix different kinds of fluids!" message or something.

Have Entity A be an an invisible entity generated at the point of connection which then defines a type for the pipe, so that the fluids are parent to them. So when you connect the water pipe, you create a parameter that all other future connections check against. Then have that parameter cleared upon connection. This would also mean that pipes of different fluids could be ran side by side. Have pipes check for connections between themselves so that pipes that already have a tag wouldn't connect to each other.

[aka13]

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!

This is brilliant, I wouldve never guessed how good it looks merged.

[DanGio]

Very nice. I'm personnally OK with hiding module overlay for beacons, so it's good that it remains at the player choice.

Connecting beacons seems to be popular, but although the connected beacons visual created by Oxyl looks nice, I can't imagine the "mess of cable" zone of the new beacon design being walkable on, and I can't neither imagine that beacons row would become impassable barriers.

[nuhll]

I really dont like the new beacon design.

cathastripic. lol. ive following this game for a long long time and i mostly like all new designs, but this looks like a april fools

some seem to like it tho... i hope someone makes a mod which makes it the old ones...

Ive found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... urce=share


(the right one i really like) maybe make it even "connect" when you but concrete everytwhere...

[Shelter_]

I want to have a button to control whether to prevent the liquid from mixing.
Sometimes I want to send different kinds of liquid through a pipe.

[thriem]

Another reason, why fluid mixing is a pain, is, because we don't have proper entities to manage fluids.
Compared to belts, we do not have splitters, filters or different kind of "capacity entities" (different items/s).

I would love to have a vanilla "fluid-filter" that is 1x3 big, so you can plump that right onto a chemical plant and have one high-pressurized pipe delivering all the fluids.
As penalty, there could be a pressurized-threshold, that those entities only work at a certain "pressure".

But at this stage of the game, guess it is fair to have a solution that "just work".
I do not like the "empty-button"; unlike picked-up items, the contents of pipes are lost. While this won't be a issue to many people, because who cares about efficiency, where a couple 1ooo liter of any fluid matters - but i like to have a slow-paced game where i can run the server over night and slowly bots building things, upgrade them and whatnot - and bots still can easily rebuild a fluid network, specially with deconstruct filters and blueprint - or copy&paste.

And i liked the idea, since fluids are a mid-game thing (well, water & steam does not require that much management compared to oil) that this is not as straight forward anymore than belts are. Belts become more and more potent, while the fluid-system just "grow".