Posts by V453000

Friday Facts #210 - Circuit connector module implementation

Posted by V453000 on 2017-09-29

It’s been several weeks since we showed you the graphics for new high resolution circuit connector modules (FFF-202). However now is finally the time when we have them in the game. In this article I will briefly show you what was done both in the graphics and code, and what new benefits are there for you as players and modders. I find the 0.15 version of the circuit connector module has following “problems”: The wire connectors are different from the combinators. Wires sometimes completely overlap, making only one of them properly visible. Modularity - you can somewhat tell what is happening based on the LED states, but it could be much nicer. Connecting a belt always looks weird, while the yellow structure which holds the connector box could be made more specific. Some of the rotations are utterly useless. The Lua definitions are spread over every single entity, so revisiting them all is a big pain.

Friday Facts #194 - Automated combinator pipeline

Posted by V453000 on 2017-06-09

Hello inhabitants of a remote and unexplored planet full of life, richness and natural resources. The group of entities we are bringing to high resolution currently is the combinators. The main problem with them is the amount of shifting values needed, so we used a specific workflow which I will try to show and explain today. Some of the parts have already been described in FFF 146, so I will only mention what is necessary for this article. Please fasten your belt as this will be a ride full of automation.

Friday Facts #193 - Party planning & plans

Posted by Klonan & V453000 on 2017-06-02

Hello, it has been a pretty hot week here in Prague, and we have finally wheeled-out and hooked-up our little air-conditioning unit, which has been making a valiant effort to keep the office cool.

Friday Facts #187 - Space science & 0.15 graphics

Posted by V453000 on 2017-04-21

Space science As you already know, in 0.15 we have reworked the science packs and added infinite science. More and different science packs make the game a lot more interesting. It reduces the complexity of blue science (which is great for newer players) while adding complexity later, and you now have to decide what to research first, especially with the more expensive game modes (which is interesting for advanced players), and infinite science adds something to do forever in the game. However, one of my biggest complaints about Factorio always was that the rocket has no purpose, even though it is being propagated at all the points as the final step of the game. It is said at the trailer, at the introduction of freeplay, and by being the most advanced research, everything seems like it’s the thing to desire, but when I launched it for the first time and seeing the victory screen, I was feeling like "And now what...". For me there is one main reason why Factorio is so awesome and why I can forget myself playing until 4 a.m., and that reason is the infinite loop of 'there is always a bottleneck', you always need to fix something, you have not enough power, or your production of a particular product is insufficient etc. When you launch the rocket, you escape from this loop because it doesn’t lead anywhere. As we can see, we have learned to take the rocket as a measurable resource sink to quantify the size of our factories, which is great, but I think it makes sense to us only because we got used to it, not because it made sense in the first place, or at least it didn’t to me. Now when 0.15 adds infinite research, I started to ask myself why would I launch the rocket at all, and I have seen many of you ask similar questions. To compare the two, the infinite science is also quantifiable as I can see the amount I produced in the production screen, it also has an interesting crafting recipe (rocket parts vs. all science packs together), and it is also an infinite resource sink. The main difference is, the infinite research is actually useful. This is where the space science comes into play. We now have a space science pack, obtained by launching a rocket. You get 1000 of these science packs per rocket, and every infinite research requires these science packs. Such a simple feature, but it closes the infinite game loop again. But of course in case you want to just launch rockets without worrying about science, you can still do that, just like previously. We have also added more infinite researches, so now apart from worker robot speed, combat robot follower count and mining productivity bonus researches, we also have all of the combative damage upgrades infinite (not shooting speed as that would get ridiculous sooner or later), however their prices increase exponentially to prevent it from getting too extreme. The rocket has to have a satellite in order to get the science packs (the rocket has to be able send back the discoveries, right?). The rocket silo now has an auto-launch checkbox so you can launch them automatically, and the launch is only going to happen when you insert satellite. So you can control the inserter with satellite to only launch rockets when you need the science packs automatically through circuit network. Of course we also added support for mods, so you can define what do you get from sending a rocket, and depending on what you put in the rocket - say, if you put a tank into the rocket, you receive 100 raw fish, because that would make perfect sense. We can build up on this concept in the future, but for now this already brings a lot of sense to the game as it is. As a bonus, here is a album of my factory where I tested the infinite science concept.

Friday Facts #181 - Calm before the storm

Posted by Klonan & V453000 on 2017-03-10

Work this week has been progressing nicely on 0.15. We hope we will be able to start our internal play testing soon, as the team works to close off the rest of the major features. Rseding will be arriving here in Prague next week for another of his infamous visits, and Harkonnen will be joining us shortly after, so the office will be prepared for tackling any issues that may arise. Since we are going to be spending the next period polishing and fixing what we already have, you can look forward to some less interesting FFF posts in the coming days. Take the lack of exiting new topics to cover as a good omen that the whole team's effort is on getting everything ready for the release.

Friday Facts #179 - New resource graphics & concrete

Posted by V453000 on 2017-02-24

While all us minions and assembling humans are furiously working on 0.15, today I would like to present to you what I have been working on lately - new graphics for resources, of course including high res and the new uranium ore. In the second part of the article I will get to an old/new topic about concrete.

Friday Facts #172 - Blending and Rendering

Posted by Posila & V453000 on 2017-01-06

Alpha blending and pre-multiplied alpha From time to time there is some confusion inside the team about how sprites are blended with the background when rendering, and what kind of effects we are able to achieve by tinting the sprites. So I (Posila) have decided to write up a few paragraphs about how alpha blending works (not only in Factorio), and what it means when someone talks about pre-multiplied alpha. When the GPU is figuring out what color it should draw on a particular pixel position, it runs a blending operation on just the computed pixel color and original color in the render target. There are several common blending operation modes (additive, multiplicative, overwrite, etc.), but the most common one used in Factorio is alpha blending. It calculates the resulting color using following equation (usually the new color is called 'source' and the background color that is being overwritten is called 'destination'): You can easily see that a source with alpha 0 will be fully transparent and the one with alpha 1 will be fully opaque. In games it is common to use a pre-multiplied alpha, which means the color channels of textures are stored in memory being already pre-multiplied by the alpha channel. Alpha blending with pre-multiplied alpha uses a simplified equation: Besides a slight performance gain from the GPU not having to do bunch of multiplication all the time, this equation allow us to do some extra effects we couldn't do without pre-multiplied alpha. Factorio renders sprites as colored polygons with texture. We usually refer to the color of a polygon as the 'tint', and every pixel of a sprite is multiplied with its tint. This is useful mainly for color masks, for example the diesel locomotive has a grayscale color mask which is tinted by the color it has set. Tints should have a pre-multiplied alpha too, but they don't have to, so we can use it to lie about the colors and alpha to the GPU. For example if we use tint {r=1,g=1,b=1,a=0} we can simplify previous equation even further and we get additive blending: This is great because that means we can switch between alpha and additive blending without having to change the blending state in graphics API, which would break sprite batching and result in an increase in the CPU cost of rendering. For some effects we use a tint with alpha between 0 and 1 heavily. This makes the result appear to be a combination of additive and alpha blending. For example, fire would eventually blend into a single solid color with pure additive blending, or would not look like it is emitting light with pure alpha blending. By using tint (1, 1, 1, 0.35) on the flame sprites, the brightness of overlapping flames adds up partially, but the flames don't completely lose their details. The same trick is used for smoke. Textures with pre-multiplied alpha also produce better results in texture filtering , which is probably the main reason why they are so widely used in the videogame industry.

Friday Facts #163 - New rails & New problems

Posted by V453000 on 2016-11-04

Hello, Rseding has just arrived for another 6 week visit here at the office, and his timing is pretty great as we start shifting the focus onto 0.15, of which our to-do list is extremely long.