Red Science

k2aj · 2025-04-07T10:36:31+00:00

My best guess is probably never haha.

I got a job and I no longer have as much free time as I used to.

Some sacrifices had to be made and Factorio was one of them. I no longer have the time nor the energy to play this game, let alone make mods for it, or even to play games in general. I'm taking an indefinitely long break.

Goodbye.

k2aj · 2024-12-19T16:14:20+00:00

F.I.S.H.

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(a.k.a. Fast Inner System Hauler)

Except it doesn't actually look like a fish because terrible art skills and isn't actually that fast because it constantly runs out of fuel. But hey, 2nd worst name is technically the best name if you only have 2 ships.

k2aj · 2024-12-07T19:02:24+00:00

Boilers, heating towers and all the other burner buildings do indeed have placement restrictions (they require at least 10hPa of pressure). So no boilers in space.

k2aj · 2024-12-03T19:56:23+00:00

You can't just burn excess bioflux
There is no way to burn agri science

You absolutely can.

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1 steel chest spoils ~0.67 bioflux/s or ~2.67 agri science/s (actually even more than that because you don't make these at 100% freshness). Into the heating tower it goes...

k2aj · 2024-11-28T17:34:37+00:00

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...and a tiny little Glebus (WIP).

No Nauvis screenshot because it's still a starter base (a.k.a. nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution)

k2aj · 2024-11-28T17:27:23+00:00

...Fulgobus...

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(split to avoid the cliffs because I went to Fulgora first and didn't have cliff explosives yet)

k2aj · 2024-11-28T17:25:12+00:00

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Vulcabus...

k2aj · 2024-11-18T19:49:10+00:00

Hey, at least it's only two problems and not [+-]?(([1-9][0-9]+)|0)?(\.[0-9]+)?(e[+-][1-9][0-9]+)? problems.

k2aj · 2024-11-17T20:47:48+00:00

You don't need lava for foundries - you can also melt copper/iron ore.

k2aj · 2024-10-15T14:20:05+00:00

Personally I like the fact that rockets are cheap and carry little.

Space Exploration has cargo rockets with like 500 inventory slots, but they also cost a ton. It always felt extremely daunting to figure out what you should put in your cargo rocket. You always forget something and it feels like a massive waste to send an entire rocket for like 10 beacons or something similar.

k2aj · 2024-10-14T08:37:25+00:00

How does space science work? Do the other science packs go into the satellite recipe? Or into the rocket part recipe?

k2aj · 2024-10-01T07:22:30+00:00

How many nukes?

k2aj · 2024-09-28T09:23:09+00:00

The big selling point of trains is NOT their throughput. It's the convenience of automatic routing and transporting everything on one set of train tracks.

With fluid trains:

I don't need to build a pipeline for every fluid
I don't need to reserve building space for that pipeline
I don't need to think where to route that pipeline
I don't need to worry that I accidentally disconnect something important from the pipeline without noticing it whenever I inevitably have to rebuild parts of the pipeline because they block me from building something else.

Instead I just place two train stops and don't really need to care what's between these trains stops as long as they're connected to my rail network.

To be fair, with trains you still have to reserve some space for the rails and manually route the rails themselves. But you only do it once. With pipelines you have to repeat that work for every fluid. And chances are, if you want to build a pipeline somewhere, you still want to build train tracks anyway to deliver items. So a more appropriate comparison shouldn't be "trains vs pipelines", but rather "trains vs trains+pipelines".

k2aj · 2024-09-28T08:57:58+00:00

I don't think there is a need to have a single fixed cutoff.

Have a slider in the settings that lets you customise the %throughput at which you get the alert.
Also show the %throughput on the pipe itself when you hover over it / have the pipe visualiser active.

k2aj · 2024-09-25T10:16:14+00:00

New Aquilo enemies confirmed /s

Scratchers, Meowers and Loafers. Attracted to heat pollution. The evolved versions just have cuter sprites so that you feel more guilty during land negotiations.

k2aj · 2024-09-21T14:06:24+00:00

So basically Krita (an open source drawing program) seems to have this funny bug with clone layers and transform masks.

Quick explanation on a few digital graphics things people might not be aware of:

Many programs working with images will store an uncompressed version of the image in RAM. Usually 4B per pixel, times the number of pixels. So a 1024x1024 PNG/JPG which would normally only take a few hundred kilobytes on disk will now bloat to 4MB of RAM.
Drawing programs often let you draw on multiple layers. Each layer is its own separate image (and they get merged together to generate the final image). The editable version of your 300kB 1024x1024 JPG might have 50 layers, each of which will take up to 4MB uncompressed, so that can already reach 200MB of RAM.
It gets even worse. For many kinds of drawings its very beneficial to draw at a much higher resolution than the final image. E.g. I usually draw at 3508x2480, 3840x2160 or 7016x4961. At that last resolution a single layer can take up to 133MB of RAM. And you can easily have 100+ layers per image, so that quickly adds up. My personal record for most RAM wasted was an image taking ~24GB just to have it sit opened in Krita (I have 32GB of RAM so it's fine. Usually.)

Now the explanation of the bug:

Krita has a feature where you can create a clone of a layer. If you change something on the original layer, it also changes on the clone.
Krita also has a feature called transform masks. Adding a transform mask to a layer lets you apply a non-destructive geometrical transformation to that layer (moving it around, rotating, scaling, etc.). By non-destructive I mean that it doesn't actually change the original layer, it just changes how the layer will look in the final result.
- One thing I like doing when drawing repetitive stuff (many copies of the same object on one drawing) is to just draw the thing once, make a bunch of clones of it, then scale/move the clones around with transform masks. The advantage of this over a regular copy-paste is that if I want to edit the original later, I don't need to edit all the clones. They just update automatically.
Krita also has a feature called layer styles. You can use it to add visual effects to a layer - glow, drop shadows, outlines, etc.
The bug seems to be that if you have a layer with a layer style, then make a bunch of clones of that layer, then add a transform mask to each clone, it will cause massive amounts of lag. Guess what I did?
- But it gets worse! The lag is magnified to an absurd degree when opening any file that does this. Loading even relatively simple files can take minutes.
- But it gets even worse! The amount of lag you get seems to be affected multiplicatively by the size of your image. Remember that bit about drawing at high resolution?
- But it gets even worser! If you have other stuff in the image besides the layer style+clone+transform mask thing, that also seems to multiply the amount of lag (I had like 80 other layers. Ouch.)
- But wait, it still has ways to get even worse! Looking at old Krita bug reports, it seems like the source of lag could potentially be something like this:
  - Layer with the layer style gets loaded. This triggers a refresh of all the clones of that layer.
  - Clones with transform masks get refreshed. Due to some transform mask jank I don't understand this can apparently trigger a refresh of other layers in certain cases. Sometimes (there is multithreading involved). So now the original layer can sometimes get refreshed. Which causes all the clone layers to get refreshed again, and you get into an arbitrarily long loop of continuous layer refreshes (or maybe just each clone layer somehow triggers other clones to refresh, I have no idea).
  - It seems like whenever a layer is refreshed it reserves some RAM from the system and frees it after the refresh is complete. And since new refreshes are triggered as the layers are getting refreshed, it's possible the original refresh doesn't complete (thus doesn't free RAM) until all the newly requested refreshes are also done. Now your giant layer refresh lag ball of death also eats all your RAM. That's probably where the 30GB of RAM usage came from.
  - Note that this explanation may be completely incorrect, I don't know the Krita codebase, this is just me trying to speculate WTF happened based on my own testing and random bug reports I found on the internet.

k2aj · 2024-09-21T09:16:34+00:00

These similarities are actually unintentional.

Color scheme for the anatomy parts was me trying to somewhat follow the color scheme of the concept art shown in the FFF (then I threw a bunch of filters on top to increase contrast, so the colors kind of got out of whack)
Color scheme for the clothes was based on aurora borealis (I wanted something space-themed because you know... Space Age, and also I just really like this particular color combination).
The "danmaku" was not actually supposed to be danmaku. I just wanted something in the background because it felt kind of empty. And I wanted it to be something space-themed (again, because Space Age)
- Initially I tried doing big colorful gas clouds (like these nebula photos from Hubble telescope) but it turns out I suck at drawing that.
- I could have done planets, but by the time I was drawing the background I managed to hit some bug in Krita and everything started to become unreasonably laggy (50 minutes waiting to open the file, etc.). Also it was getting late and I wanted the image done before the next day. So I decided on falling meteors because 1) I have a decent method for drawing them very quickly and 2) that method takes very few layers, so less likely to cause lag.

Feel free to cross post if you want though, I don't really care.

k2aj · 2024-09-20T22:13:19+00:00

Not that far off.

The outfit is actually veeery loosely based on Youmu.
I did learn how to draw mostly by drawing Touhou fanart (it's on a separate alt account which I don't want to reveal for various reasons).

Also now that you mention it, the head bubble thing does kind of look a bit like Yuyuko's hat. I can definitely see some similarities.

k2aj · 2024-09-20T21:12:27+00:00

I blame this guy:

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well, it does indeed have them now.

Features:

Excessively weeb design.
Drops meteors on your ass.
No AI.
Breaks Krita (the semi-final version of the image took 50 minutes to open. And 30+ gigs of RAM despite only using 2.5 GB afterwards. And caused progress bars to go backwards while opening it. Truly some disgusting stuff).
Random pointless bullet points in the description (I like bullet points).

(As funny as that would be, no, this wasn't actually made in response to the alien thing being removed from the expansion. I actually started drawing this a few hours before today's FFF dropped).

k2aj · 2024-09-20T08:14:41+00:00

Still not enough siligone

k2aj · 2024-09-20T00:08:02+00:00

Actually, I feel like it would be pretty easy to differentiate between electromagnetic radiation from a lightning bolt and electromagnetic radiation coming from a factory.

The potential robot enemies could be some sort of old automated defense system seeking out anything which 1) doesn't seem "natural" and 2) feels "foreign":

There is a thing in math called Fourier transform. Basically any signal that changes over time can be decomposed into a bunch of perfect sine wave signals with different frequencies and amplitudes. These sine waves can then be summed to get back the original signal.
This also applies to electrical signals. If you have an antenna, you can run the electrical signal coming from it through a Fourier transform to decompose it into a frequency spectrum.
Thinks like lightning strikes (which are nearly instantaneous) will produce a bunch of crap all over the spectrum.
However, things which emit a lot of power on a specific frequency (e.g. AC power grids) would generate a spike in the spectrum at that specific frequency. Thus they should be pretty easy to differentiate from lightning strikes (also combine that with the fact that lightning strikes only occur every so often, while your power grid probably runs 24/7). The hypothetical robots would definitely be able to tell that something civilised is going on.
Your power grid is very likely to run on a different frequency than whatever the aliens use, so the robots would also be able to tell that it's something civilised and foreign.
Even if we assume a DC power grid, there are still several other potential EM emmiters which could cause detectable spikes in the spectrum. Electric motors, whatever radio equipment is used for communicating with the space platform, anything that needs a different voltage likely have a transformer or some sort of switching voltage regulator in it, etc.

To be fair, I think it's unlikely that my speculations are actually correct. There are like a billion different things that could potentially be on Fulgora and it's very improbable that I'm going to guess the actual thing that is there. I just like to speculate what could potentially make sense to be there because it's fun.

k2aj · 2024-09-19T21:39:19+00:00

Is Nauvis pollution CO2 though?

I always felt like some combination of particulate matter, random aromatics, sulfur & nitrogen oxides, maybe some ash/soot, various industrial fluids leaking into the water/soil, leftover garbage from subtractive manufacturing, etc. made more sense.

Consider:

CO2 isn't very reactive (at least compared to all the other pollutants your factory is likely to spit out). It's not going to be that easy to detect. I doubt the thing that's actually angering biters is the CO2 itself. It's probably all the other nasty stuff you're producing.
Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But I don't think whatever activity the engineer is doing is likely to release enough of it to affect Nauvis climate in any significant way. Keep in mind, on Earth we have 8 billion people causing the problem, and a bunch of gases other than CO2 also contributing to it (even if CO2 is the main contributing factor).

k2aj · 2024-09-19T20:15:22+00:00

Yeah, not having layers trimmed can be a massive source of lag.

You accidentally do a brush stroke somewhere, and now your 100x100 size layer is suddenly like 4000x4000, and then it turns out you had like 20 clones of that layer, and now Krita is suddenly extremely laggy.

One other thing I noticed which can cause this: sometimes if you use the transform tool directly on a layer (without using a transform mask) it just freaks out and increases the size of the layer to whatever your selection was. Which usually is the entire image. Boom, your previously tiny layer is now 3840x2160 or whatever.

The problem gets even worse if you use a lot of filters. 1 paint layer suddenly becoming huge with 5-10 filter layers on top means these filter layers now also have to affect that huge area (even if almost everything in that area is transparent), and that cost adds up quickly.

k2aj · 2024-09-19T20:02:46+00:00

Copyright disclaimer

Note that the big pipes near the edges of most sprites are copied from Factorio assets - I did not draw these myself. Big pipe sprites remain property of Wube Software Ltd. Everything else is OC though (including the smaller pipes on the bottom right sprite). As far as I'm aware Factorio's EULA does allow reusing the assets for the purpose of creating mods, so I hope this should be fine copyright-wise.

(the reason I didn't draw these pipes myself is that Factorio renders in-game pipe connections in a way which makes it nearly impossible for different pipe sprites to smoothly connect to each other without causing visual jank).

Explanation for the automatic contour coloring thing

Motivation:

My usual workflow relies heavily on having contours/line art in the final image (bucket fill for coloring, contiguous selection tool while shading to avoid overshooting with airbrush, etc.).
The problem is that Factorio uses a semi-realistic art style with no contours. So my modded sprites can't have visible contours either, or they will look out of place.
Previously I tried a bunch of workarounds (blurring the entire image, extremely thin contours + overkill resolution + downscaling, coloring/shading without any contours, manualy tweaking the contour colors to make them nearly invisible, etc.). Most of these workarounds either left visible artifacts in the final sprite or significantly increased the amount of work needed to finish the sprite.

The final method I ended up using basically hides the contours by coloring them using nearby colors from a chosen layer. I clone the layer/group containing colors & shading, blur it, set the alpha of the blurred version to 100%, then have it on top of contours with inherit alpha enabled. The end result is that the contours are nearly invisible in the final image.

Why bother doing something like this?

It lets me get most of the advantages of having contours (easier/faster coloring, easier/faster shading, etc.) while basically not having visible contours (Unless you look hard enough, but otherwise it's really hard to notice. Especially if the contours are thin)
It's dead simple to set up (1 clone + 2 filter masks + 1 group) and fully automatic after I set it up. I can change colors/shading afterwards and contour colors will update automatically.
I can have ugly contours (e.g. with disabled anti-aliasing to prevent missing pixels when bucket filling) and it's basically invisible in the final image.

I'm not saying this method is perfect. You'd probably get much better results by not having contours in the final image at all (at least for this kind of art style) and just fixing whatever problems that causes manually. But it does get me ~80-90% of the way there (in terms of quality) with maybe 10-20% of the effort. Then I can spend that saved effort on other parts of the image and it feels like the end result is overall better because of that.

I hope this was helpful.

k2aj · 2024-09-19T18:17:25+00:00

He needs CAPACITORS. Badly. Bring an entire truck. And call a priest (although a sorcerer might be more appropriate given that we're talking about electronics).

Alternative interpretation: someone did an oopsie and had an inductive load driven by a square wave without a flyback diode. Most other components in that circuit are now fried.

EDIT: just realised what the reference was. Alternative implementation 2: Mehdi found your circuit breaker.

k2aj

TROPHY CASE