I'm a bit torn on quality. On one hand it could be a fun way to design around absurdly powerful items, on the other it doesn't feel like Factorio. The quality indicator seems out of place too, but maybe it's just a place holder.
How do stacks work now? One stack for each quality?
Yes, quality stacks are independent.
Hello,
Today we are going to talk a little bit about a big feature in the expansion, Quality!
Quality is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
What truth?
That you are a noob, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into normal quality. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your factory.
You take the blue module, the story ends, you wake up in your factory and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the white module, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Since I just got used to plan and execute these kind of changes. I learned to imagine any ideas like that and think about how it would work etc. So far so good, but the problem is, that something you learn to do almost automatically can't be so easily turned off. So whenever I use any software (or system), I can't stop thinking of ways how to improve it, how greatly it would work and the approach to just not accept the state in which things are kicks in. And then I get more and more annoyed by the lack of that feature anytime I use the software which I can't simply change. I'm sure it is not that uncommon, but still, it can get pretty annoying.
On the the last gif (the lake one)
> always charge at a roboport that is closer to the destination than the robot is
Wouldn't that actually make them perform much worse in the much more common scenario of a perfect grid?
The perception of bots flying over available roboports but continuing on low energy might actually be worse than simply looping back and forth.
Example:
Given a fully covered 5x5 grid and a bot that travels diagonally from 1,1 to 5,5.
If it turns out mid flight at say 3,3 that it doesn't have enough juice it will try to recharge at 5,5 instead of the closer roboport at 3,3 and continue.
The robots always keep some reserve (10% I think), before they try to go for charging, which should probably be enough to make it work in a grid.
Wait so is weekly FFF back?
Yes :)
For these 'smarts' we use a quite simple heuristic, factoring in not just how close the roboport is, but also how many other robots are currently charging there.
/u/factorioteam can you confirm that this will take into consideration "free spots" and not just blindly "how many are charging?" They seem very similar at first, but with modded roboports, we can have way more than 4 robots charging at once. So I just wanted to make sure that calculation will still consider open spots
It is the number of charging slots without any robots, so should work fine for modded roboports with more charge slots
Will a mod be able to adapt to whether or not the expansion is installed w/o requiring it as a hard dependency?
I assume the dependency will be the same as adding the expansion to the mod’s dependency list, so it’ll support optional and hard dependencies? Kinda like how all of the base game’s content is in __base__?
Currently this is not possible.
It is quite clear, that there were things in the inventory which Scott just didn't want to show yet, so he just pasted the icon over.
You fool! Their location still tells us where they go in the tabs! Assuming one of the ones between roboports and combinators is the "Real" redwire, there's something there (Another colour? Or maybe coloured lamps or a new combinator. Leaning toward coloured or other variant lamps honestly.)
The other 5 after nuclear fuel are a bit harder. From memory of the inventory/tabs, the only thing after intermediates would be more science packs, then you're into the combat tab, so I'd probably guess new weapons/armor/toys
Wow, I didn't expect this kind of deduction!
There is bunch of things between the science packs and the military stuff indeed, and it is the "Space" tab. I guess that the information that we moved space related stuff (including existing rocket silo and satellite) into its own tab for easier navigation isn't that surprising after all.
Will it be possible to buy the expansion DRM-free on factorio.com then register it on Steam, like we did back in 2016?
Yes, as long as steam supports it for DLC (I hope so).
Yes, it is a strategy. It has its own twist, but if you want to put it in existing genres, strategy seems like an obvious pick to me.
You gather resources, research, build, upgrade, expand, defend, fight enemies for resources and space and mainly properly time and combine these to get the best result.
Achievements were added June2016 so anyone who owned the game beforehand and either didn't play again, or always played with achievements disabled (often due to certain world settings or with mods) wouldn't have them obtained no matter how easy they were.
Some other games that have achievements that SHOULD be 100%, such as "start the game" are often at 74-95%, even lower if achievements came in at a later date.
Achievements were added specifically for the steam release, so as long as steam players are involved, achievements were there from the start.
The real reason is, that far from all people play (or even finish) the games they bought.
Check achievement for different kind of games, and it rarely goes over 20% of people.
The main problems with big networks right now are (for me): resources get pulled from all over the base and bots migrate, this results in massive travel time and recharge time. I imagined this would be solved by being able to allocate bots to roboports and with the scheduling change. Sure, some resources might still be exchanged between lines of production but only if it's faster to do so, from what I understand.
Or are you also talking about UPS advantages?
Generally speaking, smaller network is somewhat more ups friendly, because there are less robots and charging places to choose from when doing the logic.We can optimise all we want, but I don't think it is possible to get the complexity to O(1) when choosing a roboport for charging for example, so the bigger network will always have some small penalty.
On the other hand, finding where to pick some specific material from actually has O(1) complexity, as we have a special data structure for that since the beginning, which is very nice, but the limitation of the data structure is, that you find "some" place where to drop the item, not the closest one.
I love it, does this mean that we can do bot megabases with one big network instead of many smaller ones? It seems that the queue system could really get rid of the problems that big networks have.
Lot of the advantages of separating networks still hold.
Most of these additions are stuff I have at some point thought about, both problems and possible solutions, so I'm really glad they were addressed!
It would be amazing if bots did do some amount of pathfinding, it would not be that hard or complex (computatially sdpeaking) to implement an algorithm that chooses where to go based on max possible distance before needed to charge to some extent.
But at the very least, the game should make sure bots don't start looking to recharge when the can complete their assignment before running out of battery!!!
It would be possible to make robots pathing, but I personally prefer 10 000 beautiful idiot robot children (Thanks for the phrase r/Nicksaurus) rather then 1 000 smart robots.
I find the design which leaves it to the player to make robots more efficient part of the challange. That is why the change doesn't completely solve the lake problem at the end, as the robots would still get a huge speed penalty when going above a big lake without supporting charging places. So making a "bridge" of roboports for them is still desirable, but at least, this won't completely halt your factory.
If I understood everything correctly, actives robots will have properties for estimated idle time & position. Does this mean that:
- When a personal robot is constructing an entity: the estimated final position will be at the constructed entity's position.
- When a personal robot is bringing an item to the player's inventory: the estimated final position will be the player's position.
I assume also that once a task is added to a robot's queue, it will remain there and not get dynamically reassigned.
Does this mean that if a player stands e.g. very close to a full chest and deconstructs it, the game will assign tasks to empty the chest to the personal robots, and if the player then walks far away from the chest the personal robots would then a very long task queue ahead of them? Would the estimated idle time be updated when the player moves?
I don't think that existing tasks get re-evaluated this way, this is why we stated it is only an estimate (heuristic). We tried to hit the sweet spot of being reasonably precise and useful while also simple enough to not hit the performance.
An other new feature I've noticed is that in the image with the roboport robot request feature in the inventory the red wire doesn't stack. I think the wires are now permanent, so hopefully there is no need to craft a bunch of them when designing circuits.
And the wires are in two places in the inventory. This can't be filtering, because there would be a blue background behind the slot, so maybe it's changed.
Or the inventory sorting could be turned off entirely, but that wouldn't be exciting.
It will be discussed in more detail in the future, but
Will those capabilities be available for modders when the expansion is installed, then? (though I’m not sure I like locking down the engine to prevent reimplementation of the expansion; that seems more like something that should be a ToS enforcement on the mod portal than something built into the game, in my opinion; is this the plan just because it’s easier on your limited personnel?)
There are (will be) bunch of switches in the mod json file, which specifies what kind of "special features" is the mod demanding.
If the mod demands the space-platforms feature for example, the related stuff will be usable by the mod, but the mod will require to have the expansion executable.
TL;DR; There can be both expansion/non expansion mods, based on what the mod wants to use.
Do the things like the robot improvements come as a free update or require the purchase of the expansion?
These changes come as free update.
It would actually be technically harder to make it only for an expansion, as it is change of how the thing is programmed in general.
Generally speaking, expansion stuff is new content (like the space platform, other planets, etc.). Sometimes, new engine capabilities might be expansion only, as there would be way too easy to make mod which just gives you the new expansion content, it will be all nicely explained in the next FFF which will be a good example of such a case.
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