Posted: 06 Aug 2006, 10:10
Ok, took a long look at this whole Autofac issue.
Very simply, I haven't changed them since Spring was about 4 versions ago. Autofacs should be "occupied footprints", when checked by the game engine for the purposes of detecting occupied spaces. In short, this is a bug, not a feature, and it just happens to affect this mod.
The solutions, such as they are, are all very unpleasant. I could give them "corners" that are occupied, getting rid of this problem for good and all. "Great, man!", you say... but hold on a minute. Due to the way that Spring interprets Yardmaps, this would mean that the Plant would have to be quite large in overall footprint in order to function correctly, because for units to exit the Yard, they need a Footprint that is un-blocked that is at least 1 footprint larger than the unit itself.
As I have, at players' requests, made the Demon buildable via the Autofac, this means that we'd be looking at Autofacs with Footprints about as big as they used to be in the previous versions, destroying the sense of scale (er, unless I want Autofacs to be really huge, I guess, which if I spiffed the model up might be OK). I guess I'm having problems seeing this as a "solution", when one of the other game-design factors that has been rather painfully pointed out to me is that the minimum time between factory open/close is dictated by how quickly the Yard clears- unlike OTA, where Factories sent Bugger_Off signals to local unit AI, telling them to leave the Plant post-haste, Spring's not quite that smart, and I could end up with factory traffic-jams.
Sooo... first off, this is a bug in Spring, which I will take to the devs and ask them to fix... second off, the solutions that currently exist are unpleasant, but practical... so I guess I'll go ahead and inflict corners on the Autofac, and make the Footprint large enough that even huge units can leave... as much it annoys me to have to impose corners on corner-less factories, which is lame and totally defeats the purpose, just so that AIs won't bugger things up...
Very simply, I haven't changed them since Spring was about 4 versions ago. Autofacs should be "occupied footprints", when checked by the game engine for the purposes of detecting occupied spaces. In short, this is a bug, not a feature, and it just happens to affect this mod.
The solutions, such as they are, are all very unpleasant. I could give them "corners" that are occupied, getting rid of this problem for good and all. "Great, man!", you say... but hold on a minute. Due to the way that Spring interprets Yardmaps, this would mean that the Plant would have to be quite large in overall footprint in order to function correctly, because for units to exit the Yard, they need a Footprint that is un-blocked that is at least 1 footprint larger than the unit itself.
As I have, at players' requests, made the Demon buildable via the Autofac, this means that we'd be looking at Autofacs with Footprints about as big as they used to be in the previous versions, destroying the sense of scale (er, unless I want Autofacs to be really huge, I guess, which if I spiffed the model up might be OK). I guess I'm having problems seeing this as a "solution", when one of the other game-design factors that has been rather painfully pointed out to me is that the minimum time between factory open/close is dictated by how quickly the Yard clears- unlike OTA, where Factories sent Bugger_Off signals to local unit AI, telling them to leave the Plant post-haste, Spring's not quite that smart, and I could end up with factory traffic-jams.
Sooo... first off, this is a bug in Spring, which I will take to the devs and ask them to fix... second off, the solutions that currently exist are unpleasant, but practical... so I guess I'll go ahead and inflict corners on the Autofac, and make the Footprint large enough that even huge units can leave... as much it annoys me to have to impose corners on corner-less factories, which is lame and totally defeats the purpose, just so that AIs won't bugger things up...
