Friday Facts #222 - Christmas avalanche

Factorio - Klonan
Hello, as you could expect this Friday facts is mainly about our fight with the
avalanche of bug reports, which is actually not as huge as we expected it to be to
be honest.

We released 0.16.7 yesterday, and this will probably be the last update for a
while. Most of us now are taking a break, enjoying the festivities, and visiting
our friends and family.

Transport belt compression update

Regarding the belt compression discussion opened in the last FFF: We are
considering an option where side loading and inserters would compress belts
natively. We will make a branch with it to test it how it works, and we will let
you know our decision.

Fluid wagon update

We made a decision to completely abolish the mechanics of fluid wagon tank
separation. We knew that a lot of players would not like it, but this might just be
because they got used to it, and because of the argument "if you don't like it,
don't use it".

There are more arguments to destroy.

Fluid wagon capacity is somewhat too big, which means that the fluid trains have to
move around very sporadically compared to the trains with items. Making the wagon
fluid capacity smaller (we didn't do it yet) and removing the separation, is
similar to making the whole fluid wagon as big as one section.
It was solving a problem that has quite a trivial solution (use two separate
wagons). We try to add mechanics mainly for things that don't have a solution
otherwise, or the solution is weird.
We won't have to keep the code alive, we won't have to update the UI of it (in the
upcoming GUI update) and fix the bugs related to it. This argument is the smallest,
but is also here, as everything has a cost and it is about priorities.

Requester chest update

The change of the requester chest having priority over buffer chest was not that
easy, as I decided to combine it with optimisation I wanted to do for a long time.
In the current version, requesters have just 2 containers internally: "unsatisfied
requesters" and "satisfied requesters", every tick, the "unsatisfied requesters"
are iterated and it is checked whether supply is available for them. The second
bucked with "satisfied requesters" is separated so we don't have to iterate through
requesters that don't need anything now.

The problem with this approach is, that once there are more a lot of unsatisfied
requester chests for the same thing (lets say iron), and there just isn't iron in
the supply at this moment, all the requesters have to be wastefully iterated again
and again. So the change is, that every requests of chests are tracked separately
for every item, and once the item isn't available, the rest of the requesters don't
have to be iterated. I didn't measure, but it might have some minor impact in big
bot-based Factories.

The reason why was the optimisation written together with the fix is, that
requesters have to have priority over buffer chests independently for each item,
and it works quite nicely with it.
TL;DR, this functionality is now merged into our master branch, and you will get it
in the next bugfix release.

I also feel, that we should add 2 things to the logistic system in 0.16:
A checkbox in the requester chest that would allow the player to specify whether it
should or shouldn't take from buffer chests, as even with the priorities, it might
be annoying if robots took all the stuff from buffer stations to the requesters
just because the supply train is going to arrive 10 seconds late, so the buffer
chests would be supplied again soon. I would even say that the option might be to
not take things from buffer chests by default.
A filter for the storage chests. Buffer chests somewhat help to sort the storage,
it doesn't really replace the need of storage chests to have a single filter for
the whole storage chest. This would allow it to be reserved just for something
specific, which would solve a lot of different problems
3 major train problems resolved
Thanks to train bugfixes from the user aaargha, there were 3 quite important fixes
related to trains done. All of them were in the game for a very long time, more
than 3 years, which surprises me a lot.
A train decelerating to stop in a station created penalty around 2^32/10 (a lot) on
the path it went through. This was sometimes causing trains to do very crazy and
huge paths just to avoid this point. It was especially annoying as the penalty was
easily enough to force train to go through different stations (that has penalty of
2000) which could cause traffic jams in a lot of systems.
The train penalty of 2000 to avoid trains going through stops not on its own path
was applied to the destination stop before actually reaching it. This caused the
train path-finding to potentially search a huge amount of paths while the
destination stop was just ahead of it. It was just a potential performance problem,
but as you probably noticed, we need to care about performance.
The last bug is related to this example:

The top train arrives later because there is no rail signal just in front of the
stop. Sounds weird right? This bug was related to a hacky solution to a problem
with extremely fast trains 3 years ago, and it basically caused trains to start
slowing down for a station 2 times sooner in many cases.

All of these problems are already fixed in the current 0.16.7.

Steam awards
Factorio has been nominated for one of the Steam awards, 'Haunts My Dreams'. It is
a nice mark of recognition for all the work we've put to the game this year. It
seems the other nominees are pretty much the giants of the industry, so it is most
likely one of these will win. Still, it is nice to be included with the big kids.

The voting for this category opens on the 29th of December, at 10 AM PST, for 24
hours only. So if you are interested in voting for one of the entrants, be sure you
can get to a PC on that day.

As always, let us know what you think on our forum.