Friday Facts #403 - Train stops 2.0

[baerking]

A lot of QoL changes. Especially the renaming of stations.
Though to be honest I think using names of stations for routing is a suboptimal approach in the first place. Especially considering the newly introduced train groups.
Instead I propose to allow the player to create station groups and assign to each station one (or maybe even multiple) groups.
These groups could even come with configurable standard settings for name, train limit and color (though I am not sure if this is really necessary).
At the very least train limit would have to be configurable on an individual basis though...

[FuryoftheStars]

I think the ultimate thing for making remote control of your factory while you are away is a drone hub cart for trains. Just think of it, it already possible to spread your logistics network by placing new drone posts on the edge of it, but it would make process simply annoying to reach distant ore patch.
With a drone hub cart you can easily build station for providing supply for new outpost and initial drone post and then develop outpost in a usual way. Railway fixes also would be easier when you are away with this feature.

Allowing trains with a drone cart to build route on a ghost rails and stop’n’go whenever end of build track is reached would make building rails roads much more streamlined process. Here also comes new system of interrupts, when there are not enough of rails go back and get some. This would require a double headed train and something like a crisscross lane change (if you use right-/lefthanded rail system), but still sounds like a new interesting task on a way of global automation.

Absolutely, yes, please! I suppose as someone else just mentioned there are spidertrons, but I still feel an actual train would be more fitting (if the pathfinder can be setup to work for this, of course).

But it may be more fitting to have it as a special locomotive vs a special wagon. The construction bots would need recharging in some way and I feel allowing a nuclear reactor into an equipment grid which you then can't use to power the train would be wrong. Instead the bots should probably get their energy straight from the locomotive(s), burning through fuel faster, and thus the need for more fuel slots may be relevant. As an offset, too, so these don't become the defacto locomotives with just all around better capabilities (or as a wagon, a defacto inclusion to any train), they should probably have a much lower top speed (like half, at least).

Of course, for them to be really useful, there'd have to be some way for them to automatically detect damage/breakage in the rails lines and automatically dispatch to repair.

Maybe, but wouldn’t be a cart with modules grid be a better solution? Some things like train pumps could be added to dis-/charge the cart, and we getting accumulator cart and laser turret cart as a bonus. Not saying that module grid is a already working framework for transport (so potentially there shouldn’t be that much of a trouble implementing it ) so adding new modules in the future would add even more possibilities, not saying about mods.

But why not locomotive u could ask. Well, for me it’s about keeping things simple. Locomotive is already doing a lot of stuff, and factorio as I see it provide us with simple unit objects so we can build our own complicated mechanism. If you are concerned about signal length, other parts of the train could be tanmiters of roboport signal, two carts in each direction max will do for conventional one locomotive train, if you need more, just add more carts.

Well, as I kind of said, with a grid, the items in it are powered by solar/nuclear. These make sense on the player, but not so much on a train (as logically the train should be able to use these to power itself). As such, I feel like it should be a dedicated entity with built-in roboport coverage that draws its energy from the locomotive fuel supply, which would be easier to code from the actual (new) locomotive and it would allow for increased fuel capacity over regular locomotives to compensate (but be made with a slower top speed so its not the new defacto locomotive for everything, thus keeping a use for the old and making the new feel special. The slower speed would also allow the bots an easier time of keeping up with it ).

[FactorioForumsLogin]

I believe an upgrade to trains (via science) should allow train rails to conduct electricity. Thus bringing/coupling power to remote bases or mining stations becomes a snap. This would work very well with the new feature of building rail networks via map view. Perhaps a good fit would be the need to have landed on the electrical storm world (sorry forgot name). You would then need to discover this new technology and find the planet specific material to make it work. Superconductive magnets for mag-trains or something similar.

[TheRaph]

Could trains which run out of fuel be refueled by bots?

[Danjen]

I never really bothered to use rails or signals much on vanilla, mostly due to how cumbersome it all is. The revised copypaste feels great for blueprints, why not do something similar for scheduling a train? In v1 Vanilla, its just such a pain in the ass between deadlocking, and setting one resource pickup/dropoff for a train (to reduce bottlenecks), I never really have the throughput demands to worry about it

[GalegO]

- Increase the number of the Positions (white brackets);

There's a setting in game for this.

Yes but limited, sometimes more than it shows at max settings

[Cobaltur]

Can't await getting 2.0 Great job.

Larger maps, planets ... and now we get remote driving. So you are aware of "it takes too long to get to a problem".
remote driving is a good idea. But it is only a small solution to a bigger problem.
To travel between planets in 2.0 or Space Exploration takes a lot of time.

Klonans teleporter are not working on ships while they travelling - so I'm stucked. Yes there might be others mod. But teleporters simplify too much.

Personally I think a kind of avatar would be nice in the vanilla game.

The number of avatars might increase in the techtree of course e.g. 1 avatar per planet in the almost-late game. And in the infinite research tree it could be nice to have multiple avatars on a planet to shorten train travels to far away outposts. And this might be incread eg. for Space Exploration where we have a lot planets.

[FuryoftheStars]

- Increase the number of the Positions (white brackets);

There's a setting in game for this.

Yes but limited, sometimes more than it shows at max settings

This can also be configured through settings.

[GalegO]

- Increase the number of the Positions (white brackets);

There's a setting in game for this.

Yes but limited, sometimes more than it shows at max settings

This can also be configured through settings.

Didn't know about that. It shows it is a needed QOL and the change will be even smaller, maybe only on the GUI

[gGeorg]

I hope next week you will remember to make a joke with 404

There will be just empty screen, with a friendly text in the middle:





ARE YOU ENTERTAINED ?






.

[Kadet123]

Something I'm noticing about the FFF's last video of the Rail Planner.. When they are dragging rails across water, I see it change sections to elevated rails when it crosses larger sections of water. Which is cool and great. But it also seems to switch to elevated rails on tiny sections of water, where it would be preferable to use a few landfill. Could there be a threshold setting that uses landfill for small patches, and switches to elevated rails when it would take above X number of landfill tiles?

[Kyparos]

I think the ultimate thing for making remote control of your factory while you are away is a drone hub cart for trains. Just think of it, it already possible to spread your logistics network by placing new drone posts on the edge of it, but it would make process simply annoying to reach distant ore patch.
With a drone hub cart you can easily build station for providing supply for new outpost and initial drone post and then develop outpost in a usual way. Railway fixes also would be easier when you are away with this feature.

Allowing trains with a drone cart to build route on a ghost rails and stop’n’go whenever end of build track is reached would make building rails roads much more streamlined process. Here also comes new system of interrupts, when there are not enough of rails go back and get some. This would require a double headed train and something like a crisscross lane change (if you use right-/lefthanded rail system), but still sounds like a new interesting task on a way of global automation.

Absolutely, yes, please! I suppose as someone else just mentioned there are spidertrons, but I still feel an actual train would be more fitting (if the pathfinder can be setup to work for this, of course).

But it may be more fitting to have it as a special locomotive vs a special wagon. The construction bots would need recharging in some way and I feel allowing a nuclear reactor into an equipment grid which you then can't use to power the train would be wrong. Instead the bots should probably get their energy straight from the locomotive(s), burning through fuel faster, and thus the need for more fuel slots may be relevant. As an offset, too, so these don't become the defacto locomotives with just all around better capabilities (or as a wagon, a defacto inclusion to any train), they should probably have a much lower top speed (like half, at least).

Of course, for them to be really useful, there'd have to be some way for them to automatically detect damage/breakage in the rails lines and automatically dispatch to repair.

Maybe, but wouldn’t be a cart with modules grid be a better solution? Some things like train pumps could be added to dis-/charge the cart, and we getting accumulator cart and laser turret cart as a bonus. Not saying that module grid is a already working framework for transport (so potentially there shouldn’t be that much of a trouble implementing it ) so adding new modules in the future would add even more possibilities, not saying about mods.

But why not locomotive u could ask. Well, for me it’s about keeping things simple. Locomotive is already doing a lot of stuff, and factorio as I see it provide us with simple unit objects so we can build our own complicated mechanism. If you are concerned about signal length, other parts of the train could be tanmiters of roboport signal, two carts in each direction max will do for conventional one locomotive train, if you need more, just add more carts.

Well, as I kind of said, with a grid, the items in it are powered by solar/nuclear. These make sense on the player, but not so much on a train (as logically the train should be able to use these to power itself). As such, I feel like it should be a dedicated entity with built-in roboport coverage that draws its energy from the locomotive fuel supply, which would be easier to code from the actual (new) locomotive and it would allow for increased fuel capacity over regular locomotives to compensate (but be made with a slower top speed so its not the new defacto locomotive for everything, thus keeping a use for the old and making the new feel special. The slower speed would also allow the bots an easier time of keeping up with it ).

I don't really like solar and nuclear in cart either, but as I said, I really like idea about grid because of accumulators (not big enough? add bigger one in game for bigger cart grid) with station chargers (like pumps for liquids we have) making possibility to make power bank on rails and guard cart with laser turrets for building tracks in frontier.

Making locomotive slower doesn't turn it into something different, it makes it being slow locomotive. Basically it would make the thing that copy feature of two already existing mechanisms and merging them together. Factorio is frequently referred as a programming game, and programming games should provide you with a tool box but not ready solutions.

About slow speed for bots being able to keep up -- could be just an option for a normal locomotive. Slow locomotives would clog up the train network.

Alternatively I find idea about electric locomotives quite interesting, it's something new, we already have electricity everywhere we have trains and this could "free up" space for module grid wich would be powered by our global electric system. We already have seen superconductors in FFF, why becoming electric trains with magnetic levitation wouldn't be possible?)

[dragon-architect]

We brainstormed many ideas, but the simplest and easiest solution won out: "Players can push locomotives with their feet, flintstone style".

It isn't very powerful or fast, so isn't really usable in normal situations, but for an emergency it gets the job done.

Given that the player can ride wagons, it also naturally means that wagons should be manually-pushable too, which is quite a funny sight to behold.

I absolutely love it when game devs are like "This unintended consequence of a QoL decision we made is so funny we're just gonna keep it as a cute thing players can do <3"

[Silari]

Was one of the annoyances you found, “train stop names” in blueprints are not included by default? If you copy a station and turn it into a blueprint, that saves the train stop names but taking a new blueprint doesn’t, this is inconsistent and very annoying

It'd be nice if blueprints always saved station names, and then the station name checkbox simply toggled if the saved names were applied when placed.

[Unknow0059]

If I am in the minimap, and I enter the Locomotive Station list window, and I close this window (which itself shows me where I am), I return to the minimap.

Instead, I should return to the ordinary game. Please fix this as well

[Twisted_Code]

Train naming and train limit

There are probably a very good (or very bad) jokes one could make here about naming the stop and all available trains swarming to it. One such joke is a comparison to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, who did not give the enchanted broom adequately precise instructions, and was soon overwhelmed with water as opposed to a bunch of trains piled on him. I can think of another joke but I think it's best left unstated.

[FuryoftheStars]

I don't really like solar and nuclear in cart either, but as I said, I really like idea about grid because of accumulators (not big enough? add bigger one in game for bigger cart grid) with station chargers (like pumps for liquids we have) making possibility to make power bank on rails and guard cart with laser turrets for building tracks in frontier.

Ok, though this wasn't all what you were suggesting in the first post, so that explains where my mind was originally.

(Keep in mind that what follows is all my opinion/feeling on this.)

Just to recap what I had already said, I wouldn't want to be able to load power generators into it without it contributing to the locomotive (which would then be free energy, invalidating fuel), but neither do I see creating special grid items that instead are free to use or require new (and possibly not trivial to ups) mechanics to allow feeding from the locomotives of the train.

Using wagons as accumulators is something I think I have mixed opinions on. It's certainly interesting in concept and I think could be great in some situations (getting power to small islands without having to landfill for power generation or wires across the water), but this very easily becomes something that you just include on everything and suddenly all of your outposts are no longer at risk of losing power (unless the rails get cut, which the original proposal would fix, too). Further, unless you prevent the placing of power generators into the grids, these can then just generate free energy for you to distribute.

PDLs... PDLs I feel like are just way over powered. I don't like them. Instead, I'd rather see a purpose built, armored gun/turret wagon that requires ammo to operate. Either a single turret with 360 degree coverage, or two "guns" that only have partial coverage to each side of the wagon (and perhaps lack some of the additional bonuses that normal turrets get). And yeah, I feel like the max speed on these should be lower, thus discouraging you from just including them on all of your trains.

For the roboports, because I feel as though there shouldn't be power generators in the grid and that they should get their power from somewhere, being in the locomotives themselves seems the better idea as it would allow the roboport to take energy directly from the entity its in vs searching the whole train for all locomotives and then pulling energy from them that way. But then the question: should this just be added to the current locomotive, or should a new one be added? If the current, then all trains are going to have it. If a new one, then this allows for the addition of more fuel slots to compensate for the roboport's energy usage, but if there isn't a down side, then all trains are going to have it. So that leads to here:

Making locomotive slower doesn't turn it into something different, it makes it being slow locomotive. Basically it would make the thing that copy feature of two already existing mechanisms and merging them together. Factorio is frequently referred as a programming game, and programming games should provide you with a tool box but not ready solutions.

About slow speed for bots being able to keep up -- could be just an option for a normal locomotive. Slow locomotives would clog up the train network.

I feel like you misunderstood me (or I'm misunderstanding you). Only the new locomotive with the roboport coverage (or whatever would be using the roboport) would be slow, not all. As such, these would not be ideal for use in all trains and instead be best for dedicated repair/construction trains, which is the point. So there would likely only be a few and dispatching as needed, and as such they'd have minimal impact on the train network as a whole.

Alternatively I find idea about electric locomotives quite interesting, it's something new, we already have electricity everywhere we have trains and this could "free up" space for module grid wich would be powered by our global electric system. We already have seen superconductors in FFF, why becoming electric trains with magnetic levitation wouldn't be possible?)

Yeah, I'd like electric locomotives, too, but as their own, new entity that would have their own pluses and minuses. As a special wagon with a grid, this also runs into the same issue as the roboports with power... this wagon needs to search the whole train for locomotives to affect, which costs more on the ups than what I'd imagine a new, dedicated locomotive would. And as a wagon (or if it's just a grid and new grid item on existing locomotives), then there's no reason not to use it on all trains (or locomotives).


All of this, of course, is all my opinion on what I would find fun and engaging with the game.

[NotRexButCaesar]

To round out the improvements to remote access, I would like to suggest a fuel drone, something like a long distance drone that will carry 1 stack of fuel to a train that has run out. The awesome solution would be something like these IRL long-distance drones that deliver medical supplies to remote locations in Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t30taY9a3ZM

There is a mod which implements this kind of drone, though not for fuel specifically: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Long_Rang ... ery_Drones

[Dmytrozern]

drone hub cart for trains.
...
“filtering” traffic lights.

+1. It feels like a spidertron, so the possibility is still there, but there is a lot a manual outpost building before you can reach to spidertron


I don't know how i lived without that "train station change color and limit automatically". Beautiful.

Flintastic update!

[mophab]

Would be nice if circuits could read the incoming trains and limit info from a station.