Those space platform building animation look so good, i wonder if every building will have it’s specific animation. Also the logistic groups will probably become my favourite new feature.
No, we won't have custom animation for every building, that would be too much.
But we will have some general scaffolding extension animation.
Hello, today we will go over some of the details of Space platforms we couldn't fit into the last FFF, as well as some new features that will tie the whole system together.
Without construction robots, do the things just magically appear on the platform?
Many things we show in FFFs these days are work in progress, including the space platform building visualizations.
Let me present the tiles building animation preview.
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We will have something similar for entities too, so things won't magically appear, but it will be as though the platform is 'building' them by itself.
If blue science leads to rockets do we get advanced stuff like low density structure and rocket control unit earlier, or are rockets different?
Low density structure is blue science. Rocket control units were removed an...
This made me wonder, what happens right now if you try to underground belt across water? Does it prevent it?
Water is still fine, but there are other examples where it doesn't work in the expansion later on.
I am not sure, that plain "no gaps" will work for your goal. A spiral structure (like the Milky Way with only 2 arms) will have the same issue and have no gaps.
If you need topology solutions - you need to have a "clear" goal.
But since underground belts can't go over empty space (under what?), it would be really hard to build a factory on that.
Read moreWell I’m somewhat disappointed as this FFF partially confirms my main fear with the update - reducing the need/complication of using combinators in material logistics.
Why make it so easy to load the silo?
The core challenge to this game is effective and thoughtful material logistics. Making everything a requester chest that has access to the bot network simplifies this challenge to silly levels.
In the current game, one of the main distinctions that is noticeable between a good player and a great player is mastery of combinator logic. Now it seems like no mastery of combinator logic will give you an advantage over just using the built in request or function of the silo…
They left it open that there were niche cases where the logistics may be more difficult (maybe there is a planet where you can’t use bots), so maybe the entire game is not being simplified, but it concerns me.
The complexity of current combinators creates a nice reward...
I'm just finishing an internal DLC playthrough, and I never used so many combinators in my life as now. Apart the things where it is already useful in vanilla (wall resupply logic for example), there are new challanges where circuit network helps a lot in the expansion.
On the platform for example, you can make a simple, but not so efficient setup where you just throw things out in a simple way and keep what you need. But you can do smart things with circuit setup, reprocess asteroids and keep track of what you need to make the platform much more efficient.
And we didn't get to the planet mechanics yet.
The point is, that some things are fun or challanging to make, and some things are just a lot of work, and we want to differentiate these two.
Tiles being instantly built is a bit strange.
Why not have tentacles that can build everything in a certain range, and the hub has its own tentacle to start with ?
This is WIP, I saw what the graphics team is planning, and it is fantastic, just wait :)
The problem was, that the actual gameplay produced by this system proved to be incredibly annoying very quickly. The reason is, that you need many different items in small quantities to build all the platform mini-factory and the only reasonable solution to do that was weird
With that you could go explore planets. This sounds great until you realize that the player isn't quite getting anything useful out of any of this until they have successfully brought science packs back from another planet.
Sounds like they are solving some of the major issues with pacing that have plagued SE from the start.
Honestly, having the actual team at Wube act as editors for Space Exploration is a bit of dream come true, as the bones of the mod are just amazing, but it desperately needed to be trimmed and refined.
Hopefully when the Space Age fork of SE is released it’s able to incorporate these QoL improvements.
Thanks!
I think that the key is to realize that making things approachable and better paced is not the same as dumbing things down.
Read moreThis makes me wonder about many things:
- If there are no robots and players can't walk on the platform how are things getting built? The devs seemed quite concerned when adding remote rotating of a belt that it might feel odd for it just to happen, but this is on another level and they don't mention it.
- How are we getting back down once we are up in space? The vanilla rocket doesn't really have a reusable capsule.
- For that matter how are items sent back down from a platform?
- Do we get to keep our inventories when going to space? I'd guess not as that would highly encourage manual transportation of items to space.
- If we need interplanetary logistics and can only send things one stack per rocket do we need low quantities of these items or do we need to launch huge numbers of rockets? Or are rocket inventories bigger now?
- If things get auto-requested by platforms how does the rocket know when to launch? Does it launch even wit...
The platform is thick enough to have some machinery inside. We didn't show it, as it is still work in progress, but there is going to be a scaffolding animation related to building tiles and entities.
From a game design perspective, getting down is for free. There is some capsule landing animation/mechanics in progress, while in the current playtesting version, things just teleport down. When it comes to the way how do you request things down there and how it all works together, it will be covered later.
You can't keep your inventory, only your armor. Platform payload is quite limited, more on it later.
Rockets are not limited per stack, but per weight, more on it later. But even so, you are going to send quite a big amount of rockets in the expansion (many thousands at least, probably more, but don't forget rockets are 20 times less expensive now), this is why rockets were made much cheaper and little bit more simple to produce, to not make the whole expans...
Read moreYou'd still be able to place an underground belt that goes between the two prongs of a C-shaped platform
No you can't. I twouldn't make any sense.
Why no holes in the spaceship? Is it just to force size/weight to be linear?
Game-design reasons.
If you could build holes, you can just make sparse (non compact) setup, with the tiles only on needed places.
With the holes being disabled, you are more likely to build compact platform area, which you need to compactly fill with machinery.
I know people don't love to see criticisms about our favorite game, but I wish the audio team got as many resources as the graphics team. The graphics are incredible. The gameplay is incredible. The audio, well, the audio seems to be the red headed step child.
It's not really noticeable on little PC speakers but if you play this game on a quality sound system the audio comes up a little short.
Audio got a lot of love as well. Including my personal longest wanted feature (you can try to guess what it is)It will be covered later in FFFs.
I hope next time they're going to tell us about the rockets. I was imagining SE 500-slots rockets when I read about the auto-request feature, and I really don't think SE-style rockets would work here. So I would imagine, Space Age rockets are probably small, with maybe just a handful of inventory slots?
And that leads to even bigger question: how do you send things back to the planet? If the space hub has one huge inventory, how do you choose which items you will send down?
Had to leave some things for another friday, this was already big, sorry! :)
There is something weird about just plopping down ghosts on the platform and those ghosts appearing out of thin air (yes, yes. I know these items are in the hub, but still)
Would it be possible to introduce a space power armor with rockets to move in space? Or maybe rocket powered bots?
Secondly, the stars moving in the background of the space platform when it's moving shouldnt really happen... Maybe I'm pedantic, but I find it quite annoying/distracting/immersion breaking...
Also, should the space platform slow down at all when the thrusters are idle? I mean, there is not really a counterforce present which would slow the platform down...
Oh yes sh*t I forgot to include a preview of the construction visualization, there will be something cool! :) some other fff
Hello,
Several FFFs ago we have shown you what a Space platform can look like (FFF-373), today we would like to explain how they work in a bit more detail.
Space platforms are little (or not) flying factories that act as the means of transportation between planets, both for items and players.
You start by launching an item called "Space platform starter pack" into space. The item is inserted into the rocket silo in a similar way to the satellite.
This rocket is carrying a space platform starter pack, as you can tell from looking at the alt-mode overlay.
The initial platform has only one structure - the space platform hub. The hub is a 1-per-platform central enti...
Read moreUse the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experimental.
External link →hmm, i’ve tried but didn’t get it to work. I don’t have wired though; maybe that’s why
You might need to change this setting on your Nintendo Switch: go to Settings->Controllers and Sensors-> change "Pro Controller Wired Communication" to On
Yeah. I understand the difficulty. But this is not a reason for me not to publish the suggestion.
If they don't accept the suggestion, then they simply will not accept it. And it's all.
The main problem is, I don't even know how would you do this. Giving each rail a concrete version almost certainly isn't quite the clean solution as any non-straight rails would weirdly stick out of the concrete anyway, so you'd want something smarter which can hide/unhide sections of concrete on rails, and that sounds pretty nuts.
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