Our toy trains are getting to choochoose from a whole lot of different rail pieces to run on. ![]() Have a look how jagged the new rail shape candidate curve would be: The straight tracks are easy to make, but it's the curves which are difficult when we can only move the control points by entire tiles.Ĭutting the curves in half would add control points in places which make it impossible to make the curve look nice. This is necessary to make rail planner, and rail signal There is one main rule that even the new rail implementation adheres to - every connection point has to be This idea is great and all, but how do we put it into tiles, rail shapes and actual graphics.Īll of the above sounds excellent on paper, but when it comes to the implementation, geometry is merciless. Half-diagonal rail between two half-curves - ANY length S-bend! Plus, we would add half-diagonal directions to rails which could extend the S-bend as much as we want. So we came to the conclusion that it might be ideal to split the curve in half, allow opposite curves to connect toĮach other - forming an S-bend and allowing signals to be placed in the middle. I'm not entirely sure if this needs words, but I believe to a lot of us this is nightmare fuel delivered by pixels. Offset - which would be achievable by building two of the 2-tile offsets in a row, but that would be. Offsetting rails by 2 tiles is nice, but maybe even more important is a 4 tile Or require two more connections (s-bend left, s-bend right) - which would mean that rail performance would sufferīecause of more options, and also that when you manually drive a train, arrow keys would not be enough to clearlyĪnd it gets worse, because adding just a single s-bend special piece would not be enough. Would either make curves incompatible with s-bends - you could only build one, not both on the same spot - which would be a technical Let yourself dream for a moment, and enjoy the idea of how beautiful an S-bend like this would be.īut as always when it comes to Factorio, things are never simple.Īll 5 of these directions would need to connect to a single rail piece.Īt the moment, every rail can connect to at most 3 directions - left, straight and right. If we were to update the rail system, it would have to improve all of the major problems in a convincing way.Īdding an S-bend piece sounds like a very simple change - it would be just a special piece which would allow you to This was a prime opportunity to think really hard about Would be that we could easily define pretty much any rail shape. ![]() Diagonal rails had front and back signal positions overlappingīoskid was more than keen to rewrite large sections of the underlying rail code as one of the new benefits.Curved rail being the only entity with multiple bounding boxes.How many times did you need to restructure an intersection because you couldn't place signals inside.Īpart from this, the code of the rail system accumulated some technical debt over time, like: Trial and error to see if you can signal it properly. ![]() Signal positions are often very restrictive as soon as curved rails cross any other rail. How many times has it happened to you that two of your rails wouldn't be able to easily connect. So called "S-bends" are not possible - two parallel rails would need at least 6 tiles in the perpendicular ![]() Whenever playing the game, we'd be reminded about two annoyances that are caused by technical limitations. There are certain areas in Factorio that we haven't really had the courage to change for a long time.
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