Removing RTL language translations Wheybags I'm sorry to say that we have removed the RTL language translations (Hebrew and Arabic) in 0.17.20. Until this point we've had a half implementation of RTL languages, where the text is simply flipped when we download it from Crowdin. This 'works' for a decent proportion of things, but not nearly 100%. In order to attain the level of polish we want for the 1.0 release, we would need to spend a lot of time implementing proper support for RTL layouts. This just doesn't make sense for us given our current goals, and the proportion of our player base which uses these languages (less than 0.1%). We decided that instead of completely gutting the translations, we could leave them in for those who enjoy them, but not to offer them in the GUI as defaults. The languages will remain up on Crowdin, and the locale files will still be present in game, but there will be no option in the in-game language options dialog to choose them. If you want to use an RTL language, you will have to manually edit your config file to set your locale. Detailed instructions are available on our forum. What this also means, is that we won't be investigating any bug reports about RTL issues.
New Fluid system 2 (Dominik) Hi Factorians, Here is Dominik, with an update on the fluids. This time it is pretty much finished so I can tell you facts instead of just speculations. You will find how the new algorithm will work and some new handy usability features. In FFF-260 I wrote about how it all started, why we are doing it and what the plan is. There was a huge response from you all and I want to thank everyone for their contributions. Let me apologise to redditors, as at the beginning I started responding on the forums and when I realized there is reddit too, there were too many comments for me to handle. The forum users produced many ideas on how the system could work. About third of them was a fluid teleportation, many where known but many were entirely new and interesting. What intrigued me was the large variety of backgrounds they came from - differents kinds of engineers (mechanical, CS, electrical, ...), mathematicians, physicists, and even people with real pipes hands on experience. I won’t go through them here, you can find them on the forums or reddit. There were two proposals on the forum though that were so good that they made it into the game - from quinor and TheYeast. Both of these proposals were very similar and kinda similar to the previous game logic. What it shares is that the mechanic still uses fluid physics simulation and volume in a pipe as a base for the movement calculation. As a result, not much changes on the first glance. What they add though is an emphasis on the fluid network update being independent on the current state (i.e. updating one pipe only depends on state from the last tick) and is therefore independent on evaluation order, which was one of the big pains of the old model that led to sometimes ridiculous junction behavior. Difference between these two was rather small - quinor’s version allowed perfect throughput with 3 passes over the fluidboxes (fluidbox is the thing managing fluids for entities, so I will talk about them), while Yeast’s one was 2 pass with ¼ throughput. What was outstanding though is that TheYeast, a physicist, supported the model with a nice theoretical background and what’s more, he made an amazing JS simulator to test and compare various modification of the model. Because that extra pass in quinor’s version was too high a price for the perfect throughput, I went with TheYeast’s two pass one. Since the old algorithm only used a single pass run by entities for the update, I first needed to overhaul the whole system to allow accommodating the new one. Going from one pass to two passes necessarily means higher complexity, so we made a big effort to optimize everything we could to make sure we will still end up faster than 0.16. Kovarex wrote about it in FFF-271.
Hi Factorians, This is Dominik, and my first FFF post ever! I will use this opportunity to talk to you about the exciting subject of pipes. Yeah, I know, right? Spring came and with it Twinsen, saying "Pipes suck. Two people already tried to fix it and failed, who wants to be next?", and I’m like "Hey, that’s just pipes, you just make a simple simulation, simple AF. I’m in." The conditions were even quite lenient: Fluids get where they should. They should act in a predictable manner, with reasonable splitting/joining in junctions. Fluids can travel instantly, if need be. Respect the pipe throughput limitations. Flow can be viewed on the pipes. Don’t do f**** up stuff like running in a circle indefinitely, sloshing back and forth endlessly etc. Should be faster/more UPS efficient. I am mostly working on the new GUIs, but still, the fact that summer is over and pipes are not done, kinda shows how simple fixing them is. Very naive I was.
