Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders


Adds minimalist 1x1 loaders and stacking beltboxes for 5x belt compression for ores, plates and some intermediate products

Content
2 years ago
0.17 - 1.1
89.5K
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i New art-style discussion

5 years ago

I really like the new busy animation for the beltboxes.

Since the change in art intends to "match the new belt style better" I noticed a few things, though.
Here is an image to illustrate my points: https://i.imgur.com/zcjdEmg.jpg

  • The colors are a little dull compared to the other belt entites. This is probably because the vanilla entities use a brighter color but have dirt on them (and the metal casing has rust). The beltboxes and loaders seem to use the average color of that throughout.
  • Underground belts are rendered at less of an angle which makes belt-boxes and loaders look weird next to them. Reducing the angle would probably allow to allocate more pixels to the top part, too.
  • For underground belts the metal casing is raised and the colored part is sunken. For the beltboxes and loaders it's the other way around.
  • For underground belts the directional arrows are just paint, for loaders they look like raised structures.
  • For higher-tier splitters the animation runs faster. For higher-tier beltboxes it does not.
  • It seems the layer settings need work. Horizontal loaders clip into items on belts below them.
5 years ago

I feel viewpoint angle is slightly mismatched with vanilla entities like underground-belt. vanilla uses 45° (I read this somewhere... cannot remember where) however new texture's viewpoint seems around 30°-ish.
And I totally agree with what harag posted.
Thanks for building/maintaining awesome mods.

5 years ago
(updated 5 years ago)

I'm the author of the original mod and these new graphics. They represent several days of work, several hours of which was scrutinising things at the single pixel level. I am not a natural artist and there is no way I can perfectly match the resources with the vanilla game, which is the work of professional artists.

It is literally a no-win situation because of the way that Factorio is built. It is a 2D isometric game pretending to look 3D, and in 0.17 the overall width/height ratio of belt sprites was completely changed. Undergrounds/splitters clip under furnaces (beltboxes are secretly furnaces) and loaders can be set to either be drawn over undergrounds/splitters or over furnaces but not both. Loaders are technically unsupported by the developers and don't have the same layering options as undergrounds despite being functionally very similar. The new 0.17 belts are now taller than a tile but they stick out of the bottom of the tile boundary unlike every other entity in the game which clips over the top boundary instead. The devs can set layer settings for anything they like because they have access to the base code. We can't.

Etc. etc. etc. etc. It is juggling game which you will eventually lose, take my word for it.

This represents the best compromise I could manage after nearly a year of trying to make it work perfectly. I have submitted about six different API requests and bug reports over the last year year to make it work better, only one of which was accepted, the rest were either ignored or marked as "won't fix". I am not the only one asking and eventually they might get around to giving us the functionality we need but in the meantime this will have to do.

If you can do better, I'd be interested in seeing it.

5 years ago

Thanks for your work trying to get the style to match the vanilla graphics, and I love these mods, but I really preferred the old graphics for loaders and stackers. Is there any possibility of having an option to use the old graphics instead?

5 years ago

Also, if it helps with making new graphics: I believe the devs make actual 3D models of everything in Blender and then render 2D sprites from those at different angles, which helps in making it look believable. I don't know if that's easier or harder for you, but would help at least with getting the geometry to look right. The friday facts blog had a few editions where they talked about their asset creation process.

5 years ago

Thanks for your work trying to get the style to match the vanilla graphics, and I love these mods, but I really preferred the old graphics for loaders and stackers. Is there any possibility of having an option to use the old graphics instead?

No. You'll have to download the 0.16 mod and copy them over.

Also, if it helps with making new graphics: I believe the devs make actual 3D models of everything in Blender and then render 2D sprites from those at different angles, which helps in making it look believable. I don't know if that's easier or harder for you, but would help at least with getting the geometry to look right. The friday facts blog had a few editions where they talked about their asset creation process.

Both the 0.16 and 0.17 models were made in Blender in exactly the process you suggest.

5 years ago

I really like the change, I'm sure there are little things here and there that will make it better and people will point it out, but I'm a big fan of where it's heading and thank you for the mod, and the new art style on it.

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