Friday Facts #377 - New new rails | Factorio
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Hello! There are certain areas in Factorio that we haven't really had the courage to change for a long time. One of those areas has been the rail system...
  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    If they’re going to rework how rails work, wouldn’t it be better to get a bit closer to Transport Tycoon in this aspect? I think that it’s close to perfect: simple but deep. It’s relatively effortless to get a train route done, and you basically only have diagonal and straight rails, but it’s damn hard to make your route efficient.

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        If I understood the FFF correctly, that is not what they’re doing; they aren’t working with a half dozen straight sections, each fitting a single “square” (in this case a 2x2), and leaving curves up to the player. Instead they’re adding a new curve (the half-S) to be used with the other pieces.

        For reference here’s how it works in Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD:
        A cropped screenshot of OpenTTD, showing pieces of rail. Some isolated, some forming a branching railroad.

        If implementing something similar in Factorio (note: the colours mean nothing, they’re just to distinguish the pieces of rail):
        a Factorio screenshot poorly edited in Kolourpaint, to show the same rail concept as OpenTTD.

        The later can be smoothed out to look a bit more like curves, but the basic units are all straight and diagonal rails.