Friday Facts #163 - New rails & New problems

[hitzu]

@Deadly-Bagel, thanks. You are right. Anyway the number is really large. The most heavy spreadsheet is for trains. Locomotives consist of 256 frames of the body, 256 of the mask, 256 of the shadow and 512 frames of wheels. In total 1280 frames of roughly 18Mb. And they are really prominent for that cost of the video memory. 4500+ frames of crossing masks would give to the game a lot less.

You are wrong.

My Idea was to have 1 + 1 + 4 + 8 sprites and using where rails actually cross as mask to show/hide the gaps. Just the gaps, not complex guards. The guards are far more complex shaped.

Ok, I got the point. That makes sense, but I'm not sure that it would make them look better.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Hmm, so have another layer of "gap" beside each rail which is basically just something dark and resembles what's underneath the beams, then a mask over the rails that pushes the 'gap' layer to the top (I'm no visual designer lol no idea if this is an accurate description).

Would only need to be a thin line beside each rail and it would look a LOT better I think... Up to devs to decide feasibility though.

[richrich]

They've said a couple times in different places that the HD sprites will be an option and the existing resolutions will still be available. I'm glad of this, as I also play on a potato.

Yea, sorry to waste the space.. i found that elsewhere too... but you never know... there's apparently means of "optimizing" such things, compression, other stuff?

I do hope they don't stray too far from the original concept and somehow turn it into another XXXXX tycoon game... yack, enough of those already.

[Mengmoshu]

I didn't see it as a waste of space/time. I only mentioned that the devs have said stuff to backup my statement. I've been meaning to try the Texture Compression option I've seen in the Graphics settings.

I'm not too worried about them messing up Factorio. But I am very curious what sort of game they'll do next.

[FasterJump]

I think the rail loop looks odd because it should be elliptic, not circle.

Factorio use tiles of 32x32 pixels, rendering 1:1 at zoom scrolling -12 (0 is max zoom in)
A vertical belt is about 30 pixels wide.
An horisontal belt is about 26 pixels wide.

I think that if the tiles were rectangular, maybe 32x28, the perspective would looks better.

Most 2D games with a top-down view use square tiles, why so few games use rectangular tiles?

[RobertTerwilliger]

I think the rail loop looks odd because it should be elliptic, not circle.

Factorio use tiles of 32x32 pixels, rendering 1:1 at zoom scrolling -12 (0 is max zoom in)
A vertical belt is about 30 pixels wide.
An horisontal belt is about 26 pixels wide.

I think that if the tiles were rectangular, maybe 32x28, the perspective would looks better.

Most 2D games with a top-down view use square tiles, why so few games use rectangular tiles?

That was discussed way too many times already. Wube are aware of the problem, and they wish they did another way (rectangular grid as an option), but now it's too late, unfortunately.

It amazes me every time a FFF gets posted on how much work can get into something so "simple" as drawing rails!
The new rails look great but something disturbed me on those preview pictures. I finally got it: the old rails barely had any gravel under it... because of the added 3rd dimension it now looks way better on ground with the exception of on concrete.
There is no gravel used in railroad construction if the bottom material is concrete. It now looks kinda wrong to me as you would put the rail right into the concrete. Have you tested how it would look without the gravel on concrete?

This is a topic we discussed and thought about quite a bit. The problem is, how do you decide where the concrete is drawn, and where it isn't. If it just immediately fades away from tile to tile, it would most likely look even more weird than it does at the moment.
If you would have some concrete-specific patch, then you would need to somehow cut it into little pieces, and define each of these pieces under the rail, but then the game needs to actually check if the rail and the concrete are built on the same tile, which would take some performance.
Making it even worse, concrete is on the ground tile level, which means that nothing can be drawn under it. This might change in the future, but it is still a big problem. We are aware of it, the concrete itself might get some big update or even rework, but let's see what time brings.

How about rendering concrete (or bricks) between "ties" and "stonepath" layers? So where tiling is present - it'll simply overlap that gravel. I doubt it'll take too much effort to implement new layer level, if you'll automate constants change of layer level for all entities you've got. Well, may look a bit ugly though - some testing is required, but I think it may work.

[MF-]

Well. Imperfect circles used to be absolutely fine with 2D sprites.

But with the new sprites I am seeing this:
In the "imperfect circle" I see 4 "straight" pieces, forming two parallel pairs.
In each pair I see one of the "straight" piece much higher than the opposing "straight" piece.
To make it worse, I cannot decide which one of them is the higher one.
It's similar to the famous "looped staircase" optical illusion.